I have a couple of Servers in my home that I use for development, hosting virtual machines. I terminal into these servers from my laptop frequently and do my development/testing. Recently I moved the computers around in my home. However the room I moved them to did not have any wired connection available. The guy I bought the house from was too cheap to pay the builder to place Ethernet cabling in all rooms!
To connect them up to my network I had to use wireless. But wireless is inherently slow, so I was out looking for ways to improve the speed. After looking around a bit I realized I could get something called as PowerLine or Ethernet over power lines. Basically the way it works is we plug in one of these devices into a power outlet. it has a network cable running out of it that we connect to our central router. Now we just need to get additional of these units and plug them in other rooms where we need the wired connection. Buy a few cheap network hubs and you are ready to go!
I got the ASUS powerline solution (ASUS PL-X32M – there are 2 units in each box) and it works beautifully for me. The speed of the network connection is obviously not what is stated on the box but it is way better than wireless.