Wireless setup for a big house

Associate
Joined
7 Sep 2009
Posts
464
Location
Manchester
HI, I've just moved into a new house, and its about 5/6000 sq feet, what is my best option for being able to get wifi in every room, there's also an office about 50ft down the garden id like to be able to get it in as well.

The issue is i dont want to run cable all round the house, would a load of power line adaptors work?

Cheers
 
Last edited:
I used leaky feeder cable. I also ran a length outside in some plastic pvc pipe uner the ground.

I went diagonal across floor boards and then pigtail down and then 2nd run in the garden.

It worked
 
dont use powerline adpators. Buying TPlink routers. Some of its routers have WIFI bridge function which allows you to extend the WIFI singal in your room.
 
Last edited:
My approach when faced with a similar issue was to go with Powerline+WiFi combined.

At each fixed device around the home I added a Homeplug. In most of these I then simply added a Wireless Access Point (similar to the one you posted above) and a switch if necessary. I had a lot of access points I'd acquired at uni when my friends all had WiFi in their rooms and then didn't need the kit after uni: if you're buying new equipment, get Homeplugs with several ethernet sockets and WiFi capability to save a bit of cash.

Obviously you don't need WiFi at every Homeplug if you have quite a few in close proximity, so you can leave it out from some of them. Similarly if you have a WiFi deadspot in your house you could add another Homeplug there. It's very flexible

This gives a cood combination of wired stability (I've found Homeplugs to be very reliable, although admittedly my electrical wiring is relatively recent) and WiFi coverage, with the added bonus that you aren't using WiFi as a backhaul (if you use pure WiFi range extenders, your traffic between access points has to be WiFi too, and you end up with less total throughput. By using the wires for backhaul you get a faster end result. The downside is that it's not that cheap, but it's also not overly expensive. For a 4 bedroom house you can probably do it for the cost of two non-WiFi homeplugs and two WiFi ones, for a total of about £150.

The things to look at
1) The ratio of Wired to Wireless items in your house (and how much they are used, relatively). If you can wire most things in, go for mostly Powerline with a couple of access points in the rooms you use most mobile stuff. If most of your kit is mobile, go for WiFi or for Homeplugs with lots of WiFi access points)
2) How much of the house you actually use WiFi in. If you only really use WiFi in the bedroom and Living Room, you can keep the costs down.
3) Wireless interference. In a large house you probably don't have too many neighbours nearby, but it's still worth checking how many WiFi networks are nearby and whether you have any clear channels available: if you're using WiFi extenders and access points, you need a lot of clear spectrum or you'll lose performance. I've really struggled with this in a block of flats.

But yeah, I'm VERY happy with my homeplug+WiFi combination. It gives the best of both worlds with the reliable connection of Wired/Powerline and the coverage of WiFi - with the caveat of my very congested WiFi due to living in an apartment (which the Homemplugs definitely help with) the only improvements I could make would be more 802.11ac WiFi kit and using Cat-6 cable to run ethernet around the house, but that would be a lot more work and cost.
 
Last edited:
Thats great, thanks a lot.

One question, how come you use a power line adaptor with an extender, instead of just a power line adaptor with the WiFi built in? do they not have very good range?
 
Back
Top Bottom