What are the best solutions for extending Wi-Fi range in a big, old house with thick walls? I rent, so I'd rather avoid adding any cables.
I have an extender already, but it's a cheap one and bandwidth sucks. Any success stories?
Edit: Thanks all for your replies!
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If the power lines are good, you can fairly easily extend your network with ethernet over powerline adapters:
https://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-Powerline-Adapter-Ethernet-Passthrough/dp/B0778Y6K6N
You plug one unit into an outlet close to your router and connect it to your router with an ethernet cable. You plug the other unit in in any other room in your house and connect it with ethernet to a computer, a second router, or any other device that has an ethernet port.
I do this at my place that we're renting. It works well, but agree that the house wiring will be the limiting factor.
The last place we were in had shoddy wiring and it did struggled. Speed was like 30-50mbs versus the 1200-1500 mbs we get now (maximum is 2000 with the kit we have).
Yeah it's unfortunately a roll of the dice as to how your house is wired up.
I've got a set of G.hn powerline adapters from Devolo which tend to get somewhere between 1-1.5gbps between each node in my house.
The exact same adapters in my friend's house got ~40mbps.
So as has unfortunately always been the way, powerline is amazing except when it's just not.
YMMV with Powerline. In my experience it often has worse speeds than Wi-Fi.
they improved quite a bit in recent years, here i can buy 500mbps powerline kit for less than 100€
Did you test it? Don't blindly trust the number on the box. My distrust of Powerline is based on testing different TP-Link sets at different homes; the speed was almost always slower than Wi-Fi.
I guess there are various factors that can affect this; I'm not an electrician but I assume that the way your home's power grid is set up might make a difference.
I can hear the RFI from here.