FYI, here is a great inexpensive way to carry your 100 Mb/s Full Duplex Ethernet over existing Coax cable. It’s DECA, so probably not compatible if you are currently using the Coax for Cable TV or OTA signals (you’d need MOCA adapters for that). At $15.98 for the kit, the price is hard to beat though. Might just help someone get a router or switch to a better location.
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Whole thread on these babes:
Thanks for the link, a lot of great information on MOCA and DECA adapters in that thread. I don’t have any use for them myself (other than I currently have Directv and it is built into their whole home DVR solution), but the technology is interesting.
Actually, our area is so congested on the “G” band that most of us have multiple routers set up in our homes, so that the kids can have strong signals in the bedrooms. I use three: one in the projector area in the basement, one in the main TV room and one in the master BR. Also use the router function on a TP-Link extender in the office area. The “self-inflicted” channel overlap is kept to a minimum by checking signal strength with a scanner app on a tablet or phone. (It’s sort of a poor man’s mesh network.)
The routers are channel mapped (1, 6, and 11) so that there is little “cross-talk” between the channels used by the nearby neighbors and other devices in our houses. If I do a network scan here in my corner of the neighborhood, it looks like a Christmas tree, but it works well for all of us.
Some of us are also using the 5ghz band. This is much less congested, but less compatible with internet devices, and doesn’t penetrate as well as the “G” (2.4ghz) band.
Your mileage may definitely vary. Before I retired, I lived in military housing where wired was the only way to go! From my 4 BR quarters, I could see more than 200 wifi signals and needless to say, wifi was unreliable for moving video, even from my Plex server. This is where I got hooked on the TP-Link. Even these, though, were not a 100% solution, as the wiring and appliances in the quarters was very old, and the houses were not individually metered. (The electric meters have filters that prevent the extender signals from going house-to-house, and filter out much of the appliance noise from each house.) Even with the extender’s security function on, there were enough other users nearby that the available bandwidth over powerline was not always reliable enough for video. I’ve also talked with people in older homes or apartments where the wiring is old or the electrical panel is located several floors down. Extenders have not worked well in many of these setups.