BT sells broadband to millions of people in the UK and realises it can all be rather difficult, especially if you're over 50 and think a router is a special kind of pig. Happily, it offers a bunch of home IT support services to keep you consuming the Internets, the latest of which is the Broadband Accelerator. Simply put, you pay £90 for an engineer to come and make your Web go faster and if he fails to improve it by half a meg (0.5Mbps), you get your money back.

Crave enjoyed this very experience yesterday morning and welcomed BT engineer Dennis (pictured) to our bijou flat (not pictured, sadly). Don't worry, we wore socks and everything.  Click here for more

We've long moaned that there's no such thing as the perfect media streamer. We've tested Apple TV, which is hopeless unless you exist totally in the Apple universe, and even then only if you're a US resident. We enjoyed the DivX Connected system, but noted it's far from perfect, and like Apple TV, won't play many formats out of the box. Now we've found another system, called the Popcorn Hour A-100, which promises to do everything we want -- and we're properly excited.

For a start, it will play everything. Yes, that's right. It's not the product of a multinational corporation, so it doesn't have a media file agenda to push. You get support for QuickTime, MPEG-4 in all its flavours, including things wrapped in MKV containers. You can also play MPEG-2, WMV and DivX -- including their HD variants, up to resolutions of 1080p.  Click here for more

Wireless networking is convenient, but even the quickest variants are subject to the whims of radio waves and it's often pretty hard to get Wi-Fi to run at its top speed, especially with encryption turned on and a few walls in the way. So what's the solution when you really can't run an Ethernet cable? We'd suggest sending data over your home electrical cabling is as good a way as any.

Using electrical cables to transmit data isn't an especially new idea, but it's only recently that we are starting to see the sort of transmission speeds that make it more useful than Wi-Fi. The Solwise Homeplug NET-PL-200AV-PUSH has two distinctive features; the first is that it claims it can operate at 200Mbps. The other is that it will take you significantly less time to get it working than it does to say the name of the product.  Click here for more

Do you remember Apple TV? You know, that clever plan of Steve's to get a few more quid out of you without actually having any sort of idea as to what use it might be? With no clear direction emerging from Cupertino, it's fortunate that other companies are creating products that fill the desire for media-streaming boxes.

D-Link is one such, and its DSM-330 has been built with DivX in mind, and comes under the name 'DivX Connected', which is a fancy way of saying it grabs DivX video from your PC or the Internet and plays it on your TV. It will also play MP3, JPG and BMP files and there's support for WMA and WMV, but these must be transcoded by your computer before they can be played.  Click here for more

Most Crave staffers gasped in astonishment when they heard a UK man was arrested for piggybacking a Wi-Fi network. Why wouldn't we? Most of us have done it before -- usually when our home broadband is broken or unavailable. But does it make us criminals? Does the blame lie at the feet of the imbeciles who forget to secure their Wi-Fi network? Should a 'harmless' bit of piggybacking land us with a criminal record?

We're reluctant to say it, but: yes. The man arrested in the most recent case was charged with "dishonestly obtaining electronic communications services with intent to avoid payment" -- an offence under the Communications Act 2003 and a potential breach of the Computer Misuse Act.

He (and the people cautioned for similar offences earlier in the year) was not simply freeloading off a neighbour. These people appeared to be active "war drivers" -- people who deliberately locate and exploit Wi-Fi connections to avoid paying for Internet access. Why else would they be driving around with laptops, car windows obscured by pieces of cardboard? They're crooks; they know it and the law knows it. Click here for more

Internet radio offers a dizzying level of choice from around the world. If you want to listen to the Peruvian Chris Moyles, or you just want more stations than your FM or DAB radio can offer, you won't go far wrong with the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin Wi-Fi Internet Radio from Acoustic Energy.

AE's portable wedge-shaped box makes Internet radio simple. This plug-and-play device links directly to any Wi-Fi network and gives you the ability to listen to live as well as listen-again radio content without turning on your PC.

We particularly like the prominent rubber twiddler, which has a pleasing clicky feel to it. Unfortunately, Crave's office Wi-Fi network is currently more secure than Guantanamo, so we couldn't test this out for ourselves. Click here for more

Wi-Fi will rot children's brains, eat their innards and decay the fabric of modern society as we know it. These are the sentiments of the mainstream media after a study found peak radiation from Wi-Fi is three times that from a mobile phone mast.

The tests, conducted for an episode of BBC's Panorama, will raise fears that Wi-Fi is a health time bomb. Will the fact it's used in 70 per cent of British schools give rise to a nation of cancer-ridden teenagers? Or are those behind the tests just leading a witch-hunt of a technology they don't truly understand?

There are arguments to support both cases. Wi-Fi networks are essentially smaller versions of mobile-phone masts, which themselves have been proven to cause headaches, fatigue, dizziness, nausea and memory loss. If a Wi-Fi laptop emits up to three times more radiation and they're in your kid's classroom -- little Johnny is doomed, surely? Click here for more

You gotta love Wi-Fi. It's liberated us from the shackles of cabledom and allowed the tight of pocket to pilfer next door's broadband from the comfort of their own home. But if, like some people we know, you're having to camp at the bottom of your garden before your laptop will pick up a nearby signal, you might want to consider wireless equipment using the draft 802.11n standard.

We've been using two such devices for a few weeks now -- the D-Link DWA-645 PC Card adaptor, and the D-Link DIR-655 Xtreme N router. Both are touted as offering wireless connections that are up to 14x faster, and with 6x more range than standard 802.11g Wi-Fi. D-Link also claims to offer intelligent QoS (quality of service), so media streaming, VoIP conversations and gaming connections are given priority over Web browsing.  Click here for more

Okay, we'll admit it, everything that streams media feels a little like Apple TV to us. This probably isn't fair on all the perfectly good products hitting the market that are trying hard to be useful and worthy of our hard-earned. The latest company to do streaming media over your home network is Netgear, an old pro when it comes to networking paraphernalia.

The most interesting feature of the EVA8000 is its ability to sniff out media on your network. Once it's found stuff, it arranges it into an easy-to-navigate library you can browse on your TV. You can also listen to Internet radio and keep up-to-date with RSS feeds. If you have a PC with a TV tuner, the Netgear can pause and rewind live TV over the network.  Click here for more

On the off chance you hadn't noticed, 2007 is the year of streaming video over your home network. Network-streaming DVD players from KiSS have been about for a while and with Apple TV due to arrive any day now there's clearly going to be plenty of competition in this field. The latest addition comes from Asus and is called the DMAV15.

There are two variants: one is the DMAV15L, which has component and composite out for video, and coaxial and optical digital out for getting audio into your external amplifier. The other is imaginatively called DMAV15H and adds an HDMI socket. Both versions support Ethernet and wireless streaming up to 802.11g. Click here for more