We all know that using Ethernet to wire our networks is the best option, but it is not accessible to everyone. Maybe you rent and can’t run wires through your walls and don’t want loose cables everywhere. Maybe your devices are mostly wireless. This was the case for me for many years, until I lived in a particularly complicated apartment that made most network options unviable.
The WiFi worked in most of the apartment, although the signal in the loft section wasn’t the best, and in the back bedroom the fridge and other kitchen appliances blocked the signal in some areas. But the tricky part was where the internet and cable were installed.
We didn’t want to watch TV while watching the kitchen, so I had to find connectivity to the TV and streaming box, and for some reason the Wi-Fi was spotty in the room from the router. I’ve never had a good experience with Powerline Ethernet adapters, so I didn’t think about it, but it turned out to be the only thing that worked reliably where the TV was.
I avoided Powerline Ethernet for years. The sliding glass door in my apartment changed my mind
A sliding glass door broke my ethernet plans, so I tried powerline. It worked better than it had any right to.
Some living spaces are not designed to be inhabited
Our old loft was beautifully impractical
Our old loft was quite small, but seemed much more spacious thanks to the loft area. The problem was that this made the living area very open, with the only break in the floor plan being the short wall that made the kitchen slightly closed off. In their wisdom, the builders had placed the coaxial and internet wall plates on this small wall, which was a pain. We wanted the TV to be located on the longest side of the room and there was no good way to make a wired connection there.
The other side of the living room had the stairs to the attic and a complicated set of angles to run a cable for Ethernet. I tried this with a flat cable under the carpet, and it broke pretty quickly, since it’s the busiest part of the entire apartment. With the router behind the metal-framed couch and the TV’s terrible Wi-Fi chip, streaming video was a pain.
Powerline fixed my TV connectivity issues
The Wi-Fi chip in the TV I had at the time was terrible. This would drop the 5GHz connection or turn off, resulting in a lot of buffering and a poor visual experience. Every other option I tried didn’t work, and trying to run a cable into the living room was a nightmare without it being under the rug and breaking underfoot.
The Powerline adapters worked perfectly, even the old AV2 protocol, which I had problems with before, because it doesn’t handle cross-phase (having to go from one side of the breaker box to the other). The reason it worked here is because all the circuits in the living room were on the same breaker and I could get gigabit speeds between the adapter next to the router and the one next to the TV.
Use the right network connectivity for your space
Don’t get hung up on your preferred method when other options are available
Powerline fixed things for me on this occasion, but it wouldn’t work in my current home because it is equipped with whole-house arc fault circuit interrupters (AFCI) and ground fault circuit interrupters (GFCIs) in the breaker box. These are triggered by the CPL signal or suppress it completely, which is not at all what you want.
But since it’s my house now, I can run more cables and wire whatever I want. This includes wireless access points on every floor, with a mix of wall-mounted UniFi Wi-Fi 7 broadcasters and ceiling-mounted units for better coverage. But your home is probably different, and you may find better connectivity with a mesh router kit or managed switch with plenty of wired Ethernet ports. The only thing I don’t recommend is Wi-Fi extenders, which tend to cause more problems than they solve.
Keep track of what works
Monitoring your network performance shows you which devices are working as expected and which are underperforming and need a little tinkering. My router at the time was pretty basic and didn’t show much in the way of traffic metrics, but many consumer routers have them today, and prosumer or custom versions using OPNsense also offer more monitoring options. You can’t fix what you can’t measure, and I wish I had access to these kinds of tools back then.
5 Home Networking Choices I Regret Making
Don’t follow these home networking footsteps.
Use all the tools at your disposal to take ownership of your home network
I learned a lesson with this apartment. Sometimes the best home network is the one that gets the internet to where it needs to go, not the one with the flashiest hardware. The best tool for the job might be one you’ve had problems with before, and you’ll never know if you don’t test it.