One of the rooms in our house is a Wi-Fi dead zone and after thinking about this for some years I finally decided to buy a Powerline adapter to solve this problem. I considered several alternatives which I will discuss below.
Alternative solutions for Wi-Fi dead zone
The solution space for solving the Wi-Fi dead zone problem was constrained by lack of power sockets at convenient locations that would enable implementing a mesh or repeater solution.
For safety reasons the very long cable solution also could not be applied. Finally a good alternative would be to repurpose an existing coax cable. However none was available so this also was not possible.
First experience with Powerline
This left Ethernet over power as the last solution to consider. I left this option for last as the technology does not give you guarantees on the result. Success is determined by the state and complexity of the electrical wiring as well as the speed of your internet connection and other factors.
My research into the best Powerline adapter turned up the TP-Link AV1300 Gigabit Passthrough Powerline ac Wi-Fi Kit (TL-WPA8631P). The reviews on this brand and this device specifically were generally positive. It also has the Passthrough feature which means you don’t loose a power socket to this device. The business end of the adapter has three Ethernet ports which is a generous amount for one room.
After a few days of use I encountered only two minor issues. One was that you can’t choose the orientation of the adapter with a UK plug. In our case the window in the room with the dead zone was in the way and I actually had to plug the adapter into a power extension cord. This is really NOT recommended and supposedly it won’t work or work badly.
However, after plugging it in I got a consistent 100 MBit up and 100MBit down transfer speed with latency of about 5 ms. This result is perfectly workable for use of teams, video calling and vpn and I am very happy with it. After a few days of use I consider this a success.
Now the original input at the router side is 1 Gbit up and down, so we loose about 90% of speed. I find in most reviews that speed of the Powerline adapter is lower than what is input, but not this much lower. I attribute this significant loss to the use of the extension cord and the state of the wiring in general. Having noted this, for what is required the result is better than what I expected.
Another feature this Powerline adapter has is that it can serve as a Wi-Fi access point. I spend 2 minutes trying this out but the result was an additional 90% loss of speed compared to plugging an Ethernet cable into the adapter. Which is my 2nd issue with this adapter. There can be many reasons why Wi-Fi does not work in a particular area and since I already gave up on the idea of having Wi-Fi in that room in the first place I did not look into it.
Security considerations
The Adapter comes with the Wi-Fi hotspot enabled and setup with standard SSID and WPA code. For security purposes I would update these. Or even better, as I did, disable Wi-Fi altogether. Pay attention though, disabling the Wi-Fi makes it impossible for the accompanying app to connect to the Adapter and access the management features. I consider this to be very safe, but if you want to change anything later you’ll have to reset the adapter first.