Wifi options for a house with concrete upstairs floor

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merve0o0

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#319256 6-Apr-2025 20:20

I have just moved into my first home and the WIFI is not working great.

The house is 2 story but is a bit unusual with the floor upstairs being concrete. The ONT is upstairs in the lounge in one corner of the house. The bed rooms are down stairs on the opposite corner of the house, so WIFI is almost non existent in the bedrooms.

I am wondering what the best options for a home network are. The hose was build in mid 2000s and has no RJ45's in any of the rooms. There are RJ11's in just about every room though. Could these be used to pull some CAT-6 through?

I guess my perfect world solution would be ethernet ports in all rooms but don't want to rip the walls up to do it.

are powerline adapters a good option? or maybe a range extender in the stairwell?

toejam316

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#3361416 6-Apr-2025 20:29

What kinda cable is on the back of the RJ11 jacks? Could already be ethernet cabling.

If it's straight runs, could be used to pull better cabling potentially, but realistically probably not. Best option? Drill a hole from upstairs into a cupboard, and put a PoE access point in that cupboard. Run cabling from that cupboard.

Anything I say is the ramblings of an ill informed, opinionated so-and-so, and not representative of any of my past, present or future employers, and is also probably best disregarded.

antoniosk

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#3361417 6-Apr-2025 20:42

My experience of powerline is that it’s quite finicky. For the best results;

1/ both power points should be on the same rcd/fuse

2/ both power points should be as close as physically possible to fuse (ie not at the end of a series of PowerPoints in series)

3/ nothing on the circuit generating noise - motors!

In my experience the tp-link 2gbps will get about 1400mbps between the two adaptors on a short run under great circumstances. This will in turn derive to about 400mbps Ethernet speed and is very stable. Which is still cheaper than running wiring would be.

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Antoniosk