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TerryLennox
Oct 12, 2009

There is nothing tougher than a tough Mexican, just as there is nothing gentler than a gentle Mexican, nothing more honest than an honest Mexican, and above all nothing sadder than a sad Mexican. -R. Chandler.
I'm currently in the process of renovating an old apartment I bought (115K for a 118m2 apt) and am just about done with all the renovations. One of the issues left to tackle is how to provide the interwebs access in this large apartment. Its an 1984 apt. so the wiring standards and practices are quite old...there aren't even phone jacks in each room. The only phone jack and I am guessing where the coax for the cable modem will go is in the living room. I would like to avoid running a cable through plastic or wooden framing as it looks horrible because it would have to go across the gypsum roof where it would be too visible.

The network isn't that heavy. I don't stream or own any consoles. I mainly want to have wifi access in most of the apartment and decent speeds for my PC.

I am considering the following options:

1) Using the ISP-provided wireless router + range extenders (including one that has a gigabit port for my PC): this option seems the cheapest but I've heard nasty stuff about range extenders/repeaters, such as getting 1/10 of the speed of the connection. I try to avoid wireless as much as possible but if its the best option...

2) Using a powerline adapter and wireless extenders: this would use a pair of powerline adapters to provide access to my PC and then wifi extenders for the rest of the apartment: this is a little more expensive but seems like a decent contender. I don't know much about powerline internet and reviews seem spotty, some praise it, some curse it.

3) Paying a contractor to run cat6 to each room from the main router: I am really trying to avoid this one because its going to cost me more than I can afford at the moment. We still have some holes in the gypsum roof from when we installed lighting and if I'm going to install ethernet cabling above the gypsum roof, now is the time.

Can anybody with wifi extenders/repeaters and/or powerline experience weigh in?

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Zogo
Jul 29, 2003

The safe and sure option is to go with #3 of course. Unfortunately, there's no way to be sure on #1 and #2 until you try them out.

Wireless issues are common and powerline might work fine and it might be unreliable.

CaptainSarcastic
Jul 6, 2013



I'd really suggest starting with the simplest option first, which would be seeing what the performance is like with the ISP-supplied hardware. Assuming it is a fairly new modem/router combo then some of the hardware I have seen is pretty reasonable in terms of performance.

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