Connecting Home Plugs and Adding Wifi

Noughtboy · 29 Nov 2011 at 09:47

Morning all,

Not too clued up on networking. I am on VM cable and the modem is in my office at back of the house connected to the Netgear wireless router. My work PC is wifi'ed to this and I get wifi in the garden but not in the front of the house or TV room.

If I connect a homeplug to the office router via ethernet cable to one of the 4 network ports and another in the front of the house and connect a second wireless router to this via ethernet cable to one of the 4 network ports, would that enable a wireless connection in the front of the house or am I reaching?

VM could wire in another modem to the front but that would entail subscribing to a second line at £XX per month so trying to avoid.

Thanks for your help

NB

SeeKified · 29 Nov 2011 at 09:53

Firstly, only use homeplugs if your house has a fairly modern powergrid and is on a single circuit. Secondly, adding routers as so called repeater stations to improve coverage also halves throughput in the area connected to the second router.

I looked at all this when I moved into my new flat a year ago. The solution I ended up going for was to simply get a long Cat5e cable and moving the router to the middle of the flat. I now have excellent coverage throughout the flat with none of the downsides of using repeaters.

Noughtboy · 29 Nov 2011 at 10:10

SeeKified said:
Firstly, only use homeplugs if your house has a fairly modern powergrid and is on a single circuit. Secondly, adding routers as so called repeater stations to improve coverage also halves throughput in the area connected to the second router.

Not sure how modern the wiring is tbh. What would be the ultimate effect? Slower speed or no/patchy connection?

[/QUOTE]I looked at all this when I moved into my new flat a year ago. The solution I ended up going for was to simply get a long Cat5e cable and moving the router to the middle of the flat. I now have excellent coverage throughout the flat with none of the downsides of using repeaters.[/QUOTE]

Am considering this as an option however the middle of the house happens to be in the kitchen or mounting on the doorway wall outside the kitchen facing the entrance hall neither of which strike me as safe (option 1) or aesthetic (option 2).

Noughtboy · 29 Nov 2011 at 10:11

Hmmm, so much for multi quote. Seems I need instructions

SeeKified · 29 Nov 2011 at 10:59

Don't worry about it mate.

Basically having multiple circuits/loops in your powergrid can cause heavily reduced performance or (but don't quote me on this) prevent devices on separate loops from communicating to each other. There are ways of easily seeing the layout of your circuitry by looking in your fuse box, but I haven't done it myself.

And yeah, aesthetics were a bit of a concern for me - but I ended up buying a a side table from IKEA to put the router and NAS on.

Wall mounting near the bottom of the wall usually looks alright though.

That said, there are ways of setting up wireless bridges and such in efficient ways without impacting performance too much. Again, it's been too long since I looked at these things.

However - assuming you get a wireless repeater, would the performance impact be a problem in the "extended" area? As in, are the devices in the currently uncovered part of your house used for any intensive stuff like streaming or gaming? If not, repeaters will be fine. There's the D-Link DAP-1360, Linksys RE1000 or TP-Link TL-WA901ND that I can remember off the top of my head that seem alright.

alle · 29 Nov 2011 at 11:47

...You could just buy the Devolo 1409 dLAN 200 AV Wireless-N Starter Kit, or equivalent if you prefer a different brand.
Two homeplugs in the kit but one has three built in ethernet ports and a wifi hot spot.

Should achieve what you need.

Noughtboy · 29 Nov 2011 at 11:49

Let me get this straight, the wireless repeater is effectively another router that wirelessly connects to my current router wirelessly which you say would lead to the performance drop. And to answer your question, probably won't be doing too much streaming merely to get wifi coverage for mobile phones.

A wireless bridge is what I am proposing with connecting a wireless router through CAT5 to the homeplug which connects through the the paired homeplug to the router attached to the modem?