OUr router is right by the front door and the wifi signal in the back of the house (kitchen) is a bit thin. When I work form home i’d like to be in the kitchen but strugggle to hold a connection.

I tried a Netgear wifi repeater/extender but it’s pretty rubbish. The bandwidth on these things gets reduced down so i’m looking for a better solution.

Seems like some sort of powerline might be the way to go. Am i right in thinking i plug one into the power socket next to the router and hard wire it to the router. Then the other one can go in the kitchen (or wherever) and I can hard wire into it straight from my laptop.

Are there ones which would transmit the signal from the kitchen powerline unit via wifi so i don’t have to mess about with cables?

If so is it all seamless or would i effectively be creating a new wifi signal and then face issue with my laptop jumping between the two and generally more pain? Or would i be better off buying an old router and plugging that into the kitchen powerline to extend the wiifi?

Anyone got a proven stable solution/units they can recommend?

If it helps we’re a detached house with no other wifi around us so minimal interference issues. As the kitchen backs on to the garden i’d also like to use the wifi outside when the weather is good, hence the preference for a powerline that transmits over wifi.

Yes powerline to Wifi is best but tbh I have found them a bit so-so in terms of the range of the repeater. You may find the best solution is putting in a phone extension socket and moving the router to the middle of the house (assuming its not fibre broadband). Your solution of wired powerline to another router is better as that will almost certainly have better signal strength. FYI I have tp link power line wired which goes into back of an Apple TV, have used old apple airport express as a wifi extender before and also tried tp link style ones. None of the wifi extender solutions where great outside of the room with the device.

Note the routers provided by isp’s are quite rubbish imo

You can get various EoP type solutions which can provide wired / wireless connections at the remote (kitchen) end, though I don’t have any personal recommendations on brands / models. However, I’ll add this:

You may find the best solution is putting in a phone extension socket

I’m struggling to think of any situation where that would be the best solution. Leave the router connected directly to the master socket.

Note the routers provided by isp’s are quite rubbish imo

If i do a powerline to old router method at the kitchen end anyone got any recommendations on good routers for the job that can be had for cheapness?

The powerlines ones are great and can be set up with the same network ID so it all works seamlessly.

Someone had to say it.

I can kind of recommend the TP-Link ones I have. They’re strangely faffy to set up but work ok.

I think I got this one
http://www.ebuyer.com/519588-tp-link-300mbps-av500-wifi-powerline-extender-starter-kit-tl-wpa4220kit
and you don’t need to plug a router in at the other end

@Cougar I am saying this as; its fairly easy to do, you don’t need to buy powerline and/or new routers. Happy to stand corrected though

It’s easy to do, but it’s also shit. You’ll almost certainly degrade the ADSL signal in the process.

Best thing you can do for your DSL with on-premises telephone extensions is rip them all out and buy DECT phones.

@John how much range can you get out of the secondary wifi unit ? We tried one and could only get 5-7m so we took it back to the shop and got a refund.

@Cougar, understood but if you just moved the primary socket ? Am asking as that extension idea is what we where going to try next at FIL’s as powerline extender was rubbish.

if you just moved the primary socket ?

You’d be breaking the law, for a startoff. The master socket is the property of BT and it’s illegal to tamper with the public telephone network. The line of demarcation between you and BT is the removable NTE5 faceplate.

In practical terms the chances of anyone enforcing this is slim to none, however Openreach will pull your pants down for a couple of hundred quid if you ever need them to come out to it.

that extension idea is what we where going to try next

If you must extend from the master, good quality cable is critical. There’s a standard, I’ll try and find it.

CW1308 is the cable standard.

See here: http://www.adslnation.com/support/cables.php

We looked at moving the master socket (currently next to the front door, we were going to move it into the living room) and the bloke looked at us like we were a bit gormless (not unusual).

Far far cheaper to spend the money on an after market (i.e. not crap) router.

All irrelevant now as we moved to fibre and the master socket isn’t even connected anymore.

@John @Jon how much range can you get out of the secondary wifi unit ? We tried one and could only get 5-7m so we took it back to the shop and got a refund.

WiFi range is as good as the original router. Easily covers our main living space and through a few walls.

@Cougar, understood but if you just moved the primary socket ? Am asking as that extension idea is what we where going to try next at FIL’s as powerline extender was rubbish.

It’ll still be better than adding cable between your router and the master socket – the egress is likely the slowest part, slowing that further won’t help anyone. Tip – make sure you didn’t plug either end into a ‘mains conditioning’ extension – it breaks the signal.

I have a TP Link power line extender with it’s own SSID. It’s OK (has a Sonos plugged into it too) but definitely quirky – some days it just doesn’t seem to want to access stuff on the normal wired protion of the router (music library) sometimes it’s just fine.

I think the only foolproof solution is network cable into the roof space and APs around the building. That, or what I might try next, a mesh setup like eero (or homebrew thereof).

I ended up buying fairly expensive Devolo kit to improve the wifi in our flat via the power sockets – partly in order to make the most of our high-speed Virgin cable and also work with all our wifi devices – a lot of powerline stuff won’t do high-speed + dual-band wifi + pass-through sockets all together, so shop around…

It was quite tricky to get it all talking together, with a fair amount of faffing around with associated app and establishing connections, but we now have one ‘input’ unit plugged in next to the cable hub, connected by ethernet, and two ‘output’ units in the other rooms, one of which has our desktops connected by ethernet cables for best speed, and everything on the same WiFI SSID so you can move around the whole flat without dropping and reconnecting…

Very happy with it now (except for the brightness of the white LED on the units, which makes quite an effective nightlight if you like that kind of thing – which my wife does not!)

The powerlines ones are great and can be set up with the same network ID so it all works seamlessly.

Someone had to say it.

I can kind of recommend the TP-Link ones I have. They’re strangely faffy to set up but work ok.

I think I got this one
http://www.ebuyer.com/519588-tp-link-300mbps-av500-wifi-powerline-extender-starter-kit-tl-wpa4220kit
and you don’t need to plug a router in at the other end

I’ve got the same kit but as a triple pack. Works really well and simple to setup. Each unit has at least 2 Ethernet ports too as well as WiFi which is handy for running games consoles and streaming music to amps. We get around 10 m coverage out of each one but by then you have normally moved closer to the next one with a stronger signal.

I bought these BT ones, plugged in and worked straight away. We’ve had them for about a month now and no issues. Faffed around with cheap ones from eBay for months and month.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B010FKOQZE/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Our master socket is in a cupboard in a bedroom, so that cupboard is now the comms cabinet and has the modem/router/powerline adaptor which goes to the study which has another powerline adaptor, a switch, the NAS and a wifi AP.

Setup is a bit of a faff but I really do endorse separate units now. My wifi AP is positioned centrally in the house because it’s just the wifi AP. The modem is right next to the master socket where it belongs.

is it all seamless or would i effectively be creating a new wifi signal and then face issue with my laptop jumping between the two and generally more pain?

I have TP-Link and it is on different signals which is a massive pain. I’ve got two Sonos units in different rooms on different networks which is a major drawback.

There is a way to get them on the same network but it doesn’t work with Windows 10. The TP-Link support lady told my wife that Windows 10 hadn’t been released yet!!!

Just put them on different channels. Thats what I’ve done. Same ssid and password, different physical wifi devices, different channels.