Daughter is trying to use WiFi instead of a wire travelling up the stairs. Sky WiFi hub thing is downstairs - a PC used for work is upstairs - a wall and solid floor get in the way.
What should she consider - and Extender that appears to boost the signal or a system that uses two 13amp plug in things to use the house wiring?
What sort of speed does she get with the basic Wifi? The only time I have ever had problems vertically in a house was in Belgium where the house had 12" thick concrete floors with embedded 4" reinforced steel grid and a bunker underneath to withstand a nuclear blast!
Wooden floors and plasterboard don't attenuate Wifi by very much. (unless they are foil backed when all bets are off)
Even then strategic placement of a junior hacksaw near the Wifi antenna would make it work. Worth a try using one of the high gain Wifi dongles that Morgan computers sell if a basic Wifi isn't working for you.
I use one of those with a high gain antenna from 500m away in clear air.
If you want a higher speed fixed wiring then ethernet over mains is probably the least hassle but you may be able to get Wifi to work.
If the floor construction is too opaque to wifi signals then a booster will need careful placement to have much effect. eg it would work best half way up the staircase where it is likely to be in range of both up and downstairs without passing through the floor.
The powerline units are the marmite of networking products. For most people they just work but anyone interested in medium/long or shortwave radio listening they are a curse due to the huge amount of interference they cause. I have an application where powerline is about the only solution and I've been using them for years BUT they do not last. The design of the circuitry tends to be very marginal and don't like being powered up all the time. I am repairing my every year or so and not all of them are repairable (by me). I'm just about to try a different brand (TP link) that I've heard good things about to replace the netgear ones (XE102)
I tend to prefer Homeplug (Ethernet over 13A plug) for static devices like desktop PCs - as long as there aren't any radio hams in the area who might curse people that use cheap non-standards-conforming devices. Homeplug is more likely to work 24/7 without needing any manual intervention.
Wifi is more convenient for portable devices (phones, tablets, laptops) but in my experience is more likely to suffer from lockups or gradual degradation of communication speed, requiring the wifi device in the PC to be disabled/re-enabled or even rebooted. In extreme cases, even the router may need to be rebooted. Such failures are rare, but I have a laptop which starts off at 60-70 Mbps and gradually degrades to about 5 Mbps over several hours.
It depends whether your daughter feels up to resetting the wireless adaptor if it goes wrong, and whether she will ever need unattended access to the PC from elsewhere (eg via TeamViewer).
In terms of wireless range, you should be OK with internal walls and floors, though it depends whether the solid floor is reinforced concrete - the reinforcing bars might attenuate the signal. One killer for wifi seems to be copper hot-water cylinders, both because of the earthed metal and because of the large mass of water - the 2.4 GHz wifi band is only available because it is a frequency at which water molecules resonate, so broadcast signals will not travel long distances through rain.
Maybe try a mobile phone with wifi and check signal strength and ability to browse with the phone roughly where the PC is. If it seems OK, then get a wifi adaptor (eg USB plugin) for the PC. If it is not, or if you need it "just to work", then try a pair of Homeplug devices (with the password set to a non-default value in case of snoopers).
I use a pair of Western Digital "Livewire" devices to get Ethernet from my router upstairs to our Skybox, Roku box and DVD player downstairs. This model has the advantage that each end includes a 4-port switch (or maybe just a plain hub) so one mains socket can serve four devices. These have proved to be very reliable, and they are left permanently on. I think in the three or four years I've had them, I've only needed to reboot them once because they lost contact with each other.
Extenders / boosters / repeaters boost the signal level, but because they share the same frequency band as the 'hub thing' they halve the speed.
Instead of a wire up the stairs, what about external ethernet cable out through a window frame downstairs and back in upstairs? Or up to the roof, into the loft, and an access point on the landing ceiling?
Try standing the router on its side/end first.
Interesting but it seems that WD have dropped these from their product range and just concentrating on storage related products.
DerbyBorn was thinking very hard :
The 13amp units are likely to be more reliable, especially if both are on the same ring circuit.
I struggle to get wifi to work, through two wooden floors here, in part due to the sheer number of other wifi signals around me. I did once work well, in the early wifi days, now I have to have two wifi access points - the main broadband router on the top floor, where the phone cable comes in - then a second one on the ground floor, linked to the other via a wired LAN. Middle floor can access either of the two wifi AP's.
FWIW I have found the ring main units slow and unreliable. I can get pretty much full speed (40 MB/S) with a wifi extender. I have two cottages with a 2 to 3 foot wall in between (including the chimney breast). There is a doorway knocked through, not line of site, but signal diffuses / diffracts through it well enough. The master and slave are both on the first floor, this provides coverage downstairs and to the second floor above the extender. I had a fancy netgear extender but this died after a few years, now I have a budget TP-link one.
newshound was thinking very hard :
A 'cottage' suggests somewhere which maybe doesn't have many other wifi signals to contend with. It is very different when there are lots of other signals around, swamping the wanted one.
To be honest, I have never tried the mains units.
Up stairs and down stairs, chances are different rings and if a recent "every thing through an RCD" installation possibly different RCDs.
Shift to 5 GHz, or move. B-)
Yep, phone sometimes doesn't want to play WiFi, have to restart the phone. Even then it will drop and reconnect, signal strength is fine. Only phone has problems.
Agreed, if the OP hasn't tried WiFi in the proposed position it would be worth a quick test with a phone or WHY. If the PC hasn't got WiFi but does have a PCI slot I have an unused PCI WiFi card doing nothing (bought for a PC that only has PCIe slots, doh!). It's a 2 aerial MIMO and can accept extension aerials to get them out of hiding round the back.
It is a resonant frequency of something but I don't think it's the water molecule, perhaps the OH bond. Microwave ovens take advantage of this resonance/absorption.
Try telling the 2.4 GHz point to point links that are here that. One is 6 km the other only 4 km. Another site has around 20 km and 15 km. Rain, hill fog, snow or all three didn't stop 'em working.
I've found the "two 13amp plug in things" to be slightly more reliable.
But nothing beats Cat 5. (Except cat 6 apparently)
In message , DerbyBorn writes
You have had plenty of replies, and yes, running a proper cable is the way to go, but not always practical. We have been using Homeplugs for years, with great success. We use Solwise, and they just work. They are plugged in and powered up permanently. We began with the non wifi ones, then switched to wifi when they were introduced. One has died and had to be replaced.
Try a better Wifi device on the PC first. Often the card based ones put the antenna on the back so it is screened from the house Wifi signal!
Although I have a cat 5 physical line from upstairs to downstairs that runs down the back of a fitted wardrobe and emerges behind the TV.
The 13A ethernet makes my printer accessible and feeds internet radio. I haven't had any bother from it and it even works in an unfiltered extension socket.
I don't find Wifi all that unreliable apart from in regions of the house shielded by 3' solid stone walls. They really do stop Wifi.
Well I'm biased, but plug adaptor distributed networks cause horrible RF interference over a wide are due to the inefficiency of mains wiring used as network cables. Not good if you have radio hams or short wave listeners nearby or older people who still use AM radios. Some say they can even make portable DAB and FM almost unusable. I guess this depends on the signal strength of the wanted signals. Extenders work but to me there still is no substitute for a bit of ordinary net cable. Its faster and more reliable and not prone to interference from other wifis nearby which is almost always the issue when you say it won't even get upstairs. Brian
OK. I was simplifying slightly. Yes, to be strictly accurate it's one of the resonant modes of the OH bond, though I forget which. Other fluids such as alcohol which also have an OH bond may cause similar attenuation :-)
Do they use 2.4 GHz? I'd assumed/read somewhere that they didn't use a resonant frequency of water for that very reason, and that 2.4 was only available because no-one (eg military, broadcast) could use it for anything else long-distance. On the other hand, with a dish aerial to concentrate the available power into a narrower beam, maybe water attenuation can be overcome sufficiently to transfer a usable signal at 20 km range.
I have half a dozen Ebuyer own-brand passthrough adapters that are in use 24/7 and have worked without any issues since I bought them seven years ago.
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