"Martin Brown" wrote in message
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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.
The sort of houses that have 3' stone walls often have another wifi killer:
a huge metal cooking range surrounding the open fire. A large amount of cast
iron has interesting effects on wifi. Old stone cottages tend to have
another problem: they may be in remote parts of the country which have poor
phone lines (eg 8 km from the exchange) which means that you get slow or
intermittent ADSL. Try downloading a bloated HP printer driver (with all its
unwanted extras!) or an anti-virus package over a link that is about 250
kbps at best but which keeps dropping out (ping times vary between a very
respectable 40 msec and upwards of 2500 msec over the course of a few
minutes). (*)
The worst house for getting internet in various rooms was a cottage that had
previously been several different cottages. It had the lot: thick stone
walls, two hot water cylinders in different parts of the house, multiple
mains circuits fed from different meters, walls that definitely shouldn't be
drilled through or be defaced by cable trunking,
I struggled for a long time with the router in various different places to
get best wifi coverage from it and then using several wifi repeaters to
transport the signal to the periphery of the building. I tried Powerline
until I realised that the signal wouldn't reach some parts of the house
because they were on a different meter (and maybe even a different mains
phase).
(*) At least in the case that I was working on the other day, the customer
said "it gets worse whenever it rains" which sounds like good grounds for
getting BT Openreach (via the ISP) to check for water in underground cabling
over the 8 km journey to the exchange. Thank goodness the house had been
wired so all the internal phone wiring was the customer's own wiring which
could easily be disconnected to prove that the problem still occurred. It's
a different situation when (like in our house) there are two extensions
permanently wired to an old GPO lozenge box (which you Must Not Touch) so
you can't prove whether or not ADSL problems are caused by extension wiring.
But that's all a side issue to the matter of wifi and Powerline.