"GB" wrote in message
...

Or use a fair of Homeplugs, if you have them lying around perhaps?

And hope and pray that the mains wiring between them is capable of carrying
the signal. Our house is an L shape, with a long distance from the router at
one extreme of the L to rooms at the other end. And the house has two "fuse
boxes" with sockets at different ends of the L on different fuse boxes -
though still all going through the same meter which I gather is the absolute
show-stopper if you try to go between sockets on different meters.

When I tried it with Homeplug devices that were rated at I think 80 Mbps I
got a transfer rate of about 5 Mbps with frequent drop-outs; to get 80 Mbps
I had to be on sockets that were no more than a few yards apart. And that
was using a Homeplug-with-wifi device that was in a socket on the *same*
fuse box as the router, and even with a laptop a few feet from the Homeplug.
There's something in our house wiring which seems to denature Homeplug even
over distances of a few yards between adjacent rooms when both sockets are
on the same ring-main.

So I abandoned the idea of Homeplug and tried a Linksys Velop mesh network
which is mostly pretty good, though it took a *lot* of tweaking of positions
of intermediate nodes to get them positioned correctly because they need to
be as far away as possible so their 2.4 GHz networks don't experience
channel clashes, but close enough that the 5 GHz (which is what is used for
node-to-node comms) can still communicate. Quite a balancing act! My initial
mistake was to assume that variable transfer rates and frequent dropouts of
node-to-node comms was due to too *little* 5 GHz signal, when it was
actually nodes perpetually trying to reconfigure themselves to avoid
clashing on 2.4 GHz. I'd turn off 2.4 GHz, but my laptop and my security
cameras don't have 5 GHz adaptors. And yo can't turn off 2.4 on selected
nodes - it's either on all nodes or else none. So it now works well. The
only problem is when there's a power cut, because I need to turn on nodes in
a certain order otherwise one node may try (and fail) to connect to a node
that is not its nearest neighbour and hasn't got the common sense to adjust
once a stronger/nearer node has booted up.

Mesh is supposed to be used for a spherical/cylindrical topology where all
the nodes talk to one central node and don't have to daisy-chain from A to B
to C to D in a linear fashion, as is the case in our L-shaped house. I need
to move my primary node (the one that talks to the ISP's router by Ethernet)
so it has better wifi coverage, then I may be able to avoid nodes
daisy-chaining and hopefully each node will each be able to talk directly to
the primary; I may even find then that I don't need as many nodes. But that
means buying and routing two lots of Cat 5 across the living room, which
needs me to get a "Round Tuit". ;-) Two lots because I'd need to go from
router to primary node across the living room, and then back to hub that
feeds TV/PVR and my study next door (at present, router, primary node and
hub are adjacent). And then find some way of getting mains for the node in
its new position... I wish I'd gone for my original idea of running a long
length of Cat 5 from one end of the L to the other, through the loft, and
then using a simple access point from there for wifi coverage, given than I
mostly need wifi at the two ends of the L (bedrooms at one end; study/lounge
at the other) and not in the middle.

The joys of buying an old house with thick outside (and even inside) walls,
which was built in two phases so the newer "wing" is on a different fusebox,
and with modern heat-reflecting windows with "fake leaded lights" within the
panes, which seem to severely attenuate 5 GHz as it tries to take the
shorter route from one end to the other across the patio.