It looks like I’ll have to take back my snarky Tweets about Belkin not shipping its gigabit powerline device. While advertised as available “immediately,” the Belkin PR peeps said I could find it at Best Buy.
Since I worship, er go to Best Buy on a regular basis, I ran down to see what was up. “My” story in Springfield (former FCC Chair Michael Powell also shows up there once in a while) didn’t have any units, and wasn’t going to be shipped any units in the next week or two, according to the in-house data base.
So, I went home and checked the Best Buy website. No joy last week, this week TA-DA, the device showed up both on the website for purchase AND available at local stories. Of course, no units at Springfield, no units at Potomac Mills (where I had checked last weekend, only to find a sticker and an empty shelf slot).
Today’s investigation of Best Buy revealed that there were two (2) units at the Landmark Mall location. I drove up, looked for the device on the shelf under “Powerline” and at the “Belkin Networking” section — no joy. Get the Best Boy to look in the back. No joy.
Finally, I start wandering through, asile by asile (yes, I’m a little obsessive sometimes) and find the two units sitting on the bottom shelf of the graphics card section.
Stay tuned; expect to start to do testing this evening. If this device lives up to its billing of potentially doing gigabit speeds, I’ll be happy if I can pull a fraction (say 100 Mbps) of that, since I have Ye Olde (Well, New) Cox DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem and the 50 Mbps/5 Mbps service on loan.
