There are dozens of companies showing off Ethernet-over-mains devices at Cebit08, but here are the best bits:

Intellon’s prototype "homeplug in a wall socket" is an extremely neat design which can be used instead of regular wall sockets to network a house.

An Intellon spokesperson, who didn’t want to be named, said that Wifi dead-spots and poor Wifi performance for video meant there was a demand for new homes to use Homeplug. The company is already in talks with an unnamed house builder in the UK to get them into new builds.

Sadly, you can’t retrofit your house with these cool wall sockets unless you’re a certified electrician - otherwise you’ll invalidate your home insurance.

The Intellon spokesperson rubbished the idea that powerline technology transmits wirelessly from floor to floor. Due to the strict power emissions the EU puts on all consumer electronics, Homeplugs can only talk to each other wirelessly if they are up to 3cm apart, but no more.

Convergence is the Homeplug buzzword of choice this year, since a raft of audio and video streamers, as well as set top boxes, are getting Homeplug built into them. More exciting than that was Gigafast’s Homeplug that hosts a USB port. It lets a computer in another room use the USB port as if it were built into the machine. Here it is plugged into a USB rocket launcher:

Gigafast’s Homeplug-enabled security camera could really kick Wifi cameras into touch, especially when combined with its video decoding box the other end, plugged directly into a PC.

For now, however, none of Gigafast's products will be on sale in the UK.

Nearly every manufacturer is showing off a “Y-cable”, which combines a power supply and Homeplug into one box. An Ethernet and a power cable comes out of the transformer, so a wide range of existing devices don’t have to be modified to use Homeplug. The only downside to this technology is the high cost of a Y-cable and that they can only provide up to 30W power output, since if you go higher the signal-to-noise ratio becomes too low for Homeplug to operate.