powerline vs wifi adapter.
Discussion
Sonie said:
A Mesh setup (bt home) is set up in 5 minutes and is one Wi-Fi across the house. It’s what I’d recommend.
100% agree, I tried WiFi extenders and Powerlines before getting a cheapo mesh setup - £100 Tenda one off Amazon. I have no idea how it works none at all, but 5 minutes of setting up and am now getting close to our theoretical max speed (70Mbps on TalkTalk) even in the most random parts of house where before there was barely 1 bar of connection and sometimes zero!
I actually have a ChromeCast Ultra plugged into one of the nodes, and even streaming Stadia to a 55inch TV its faultless, though that is 1080p resolution but the bandwidth is there for 4K.
I use Powerline for anything that's static and has an ethernet port - works really well for me. Great for games consoles, media streamers and PCs.
However a lot of gadgets these days only have WiFi ... and the WiFi on my BT HomeHub5 was crashing out about every 5-6 days on average, so I got a nice BT Whole Home Mini (3 disc mesh system).
Have to say, for the money I'm pretty impressed. Super easy to set up and gives rock solid WiFi connections everywhere around the house. Not had it long enough to say if it will have more reliable WiFi than the HH5 but it's probably a safe bet that it will.
For the price (£75 for the 3-disc Mini) can't complain. There's a faster version at £125 but all I wanted it for was stable WiFi for stuff to access the Internet and it's more than capable for that.
It effectively replaces your existing WifI so you switch that off on the hub and cable the first disc in to the hub via ethernet. The Whole Home system then handles all your WiFi, configured via an app. After you've done the initial setup, you can give the mesh system the same SSID and password as your old hub based WiFi so all your devices will continue to work with no need to set them up again. Apparently you can cable all three discs in via ethernet (could use Powerline) so you should theoretically be able to effectively cover even the trickiest of properties. You could also keep the WiFi active on the hub for extra WiFi networks but I don't see the point, especially as the Hub wifi was giving me so many connection problems and I don't want to crowd out the airwaves.
However a lot of gadgets these days only have WiFi ... and the WiFi on my BT HomeHub5 was crashing out about every 5-6 days on average, so I got a nice BT Whole Home Mini (3 disc mesh system).
Have to say, for the money I'm pretty impressed. Super easy to set up and gives rock solid WiFi connections everywhere around the house. Not had it long enough to say if it will have more reliable WiFi than the HH5 but it's probably a safe bet that it will.
For the price (£75 for the 3-disc Mini) can't complain. There's a faster version at £125 but all I wanted it for was stable WiFi for stuff to access the Internet and it's more than capable for that.
It effectively replaces your existing WifI so you switch that off on the hub and cable the first disc in to the hub via ethernet. The Whole Home system then handles all your WiFi, configured via an app. After you've done the initial setup, you can give the mesh system the same SSID and password as your old hub based WiFi so all your devices will continue to work with no need to set them up again. Apparently you can cable all three discs in via ethernet (could use Powerline) so you should theoretically be able to effectively cover even the trickiest of properties. You could also keep the WiFi active on the hub for extra WiFi networks but I don't see the point, especially as the Hub wifi was giving me so many connection problems and I don't want to crowd out the airwaves.
It very much depends on the usage case. Mesh is presently very popular and the latest consumer tech is plug and play. When combined with the fact most people's issues are either large houses/thick walls or too many devices trying to connect to a single point you can see why they are popular as they just work and the owners see improvements. There are very good reasons why you rarely see mesh in the commercial/business world though. If you need through put and have fast enough ports on your machines and router/stitch then powerline is the only cheap way as the speeds for at least several generations back far exceed anything you can get with wifi.
I use powerline, an old set up. One thing to be aware of, aside from the quality of your wiring, is load through the socket you're using. Also you should not put an adapter on a power gang. I did and got away with it until I added one more light, then my bandwidth reduced to a dribble. Oddly enough the pass through devices (where they have a socket in them) do not suffer the same problems and I have my NAS backing up to an older NAS through a pair of these. Both NASs have gigabit ports and I'm getting ~120-150 Mb/s when doing a transfer. In theory I should be able to max out at 200, which also shows the age of my adapters.
My parent's large, heavy brick house has a wifi over power line set up which works well, but if it were to be done again I think I'd go mesh as it's cheaper, they don;t have performance requirements, and it is easier to extend when you have multiple rings on your power supply (which is one of the issues with powerline).
Note with Mesh you will normally need more access points that powerline.
I use powerline, an old set up. One thing to be aware of, aside from the quality of your wiring, is load through the socket you're using. Also you should not put an adapter on a power gang. I did and got away with it until I added one more light, then my bandwidth reduced to a dribble. Oddly enough the pass through devices (where they have a socket in them) do not suffer the same problems and I have my NAS backing up to an older NAS through a pair of these. Both NASs have gigabit ports and I'm getting ~120-150 Mb/s when doing a transfer. In theory I should be able to max out at 200, which also shows the age of my adapters.
My parent's large, heavy brick house has a wifi over power line set up which works well, but if it were to be done again I think I'd go mesh as it's cheaper, they don;t have performance requirements, and it is easier to extend when you have multiple rings on your power supply (which is one of the issues with powerline).
Note with Mesh you will normally need more access points that powerline.
Another Deco P9
Mesh Wifi with Powerline backhaul ( actually powerline+mesh )
Mesh rather than Wifi means it can cope with the handoff when a mobile device moves from one end of the house to another. Powerline means it can get the signal through the thick walls of the house.
( My second home is flood 'wired' with fibre - but tbh the Deco p9 covers most of the requirements HD/4K streaming )
Mesh Wifi with Powerline backhaul ( actually powerline+mesh )
Mesh rather than Wifi means it can cope with the handoff when a mobile device moves from one end of the house to another. Powerline means it can get the signal through the thick walls of the house.
( My second home is flood 'wired' with fibre - but tbh the Deco p9 covers most of the requirements HD/4K streaming )
I just installed (today!) a deco p9 setup to. Great so far. I bought a netgear orbi setup for twice the price last week which was just wifi mesh (no powerline). It was great when it worked but kept on dropping connection and throwing wobbles. So sent it back and went for the deco. Our house is 1960s with very solid interior walls that seen to block wifi rather effectively!
Gassing Station | Computers, Gadgets & Stuff | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff