Cat5 or PowerLAN advice wanted

Hi kind people,

I'm helping a frend to get fibre installed. He has opted for BT Fibre to the existing phone socket in a downstars room. His main desktop is upstairs located in an extension of the house (through a thick stone wall).

I'm not expecting much WifI signal from the hub to upstairs. There is an old phone extension cable with what looks like twisted pair cable between the two rooms, but I suspect its not possible to use this to get the signal upstairs. I understand its bad practice to fit any sort of extension between the master socket and the hub. The options appear to be:

a) Run Cat5/6 cable upstairs. This would probably have to run up the outside wall of the building and not look very neat.

b) User a PowerLan adapter to get the signal upstairs and add an access point for upstairs. I have two ZyXEL PLA4201 V2 adapters that can be used. If I go down this route, can anone give advice on how well they work. Im am particularly concerned if :

- If I use a 1 metre 13A single socket strip for both the router and powerline socket is this likely to cause interference. There may be a DECT phone plugged in as well). Do we need to get an electrician in to fot extra 13A sockets using grey 2.5mm cable?

- How well will the signal jump between the dowstairs to the upstairs rings? Not sure if there are RCD or trips on the fuse box.

I guess the other option is to use a spare router as an access point located downstairs, but under the office so the signal only has to get through a wooden floor, not a thick stone wall. This makes it easier to route the cable.

Money is an issue so I'm not keen to suggest Bt Disks or similar.

Your thoughts please...

I was in a similar position. I did look at running Cat5/6 externally as internally would have been extremely difficult and I would have tried hiding the cable behind a rainwater downspout, probably in a conduit. However, I have gone for a pair of TP-Link TL-PA8010P powerline adapters.

I chose these because they were a reasonable compromise between cost and features, and have mains passthrough. They have a single GbE port each and are supposed to be AV1300, The monitor tells me I'm getting about 440 Mb/s which is a vast improvement over the 30-40 Mb/s I was getting on old no-name AV200 adapters - which was less than my FTTP speed but didn't matter before FTTP.

I'd say try the Zyxel adapters and see how they go. Presumably you can just connect to the desktop via an Ethernet cable - no wifi needed?

Thanks. I'll try the PowerLan. Not looking for huge speeds. Even with fibre we will only be getting 15Mbps.

a) Run Cat5/6 cable upstairs. This would probably have to run up the outside wall of the building and not look very neat.

There�s yer answer... every time.

I've tried tp link AV 600 powelines across two ring mains and ended up with intermittent connection drops. In the end I got a wireless card for the desktop which performed faster and didn't drop the connection.

I'd recommend running cat 5 or getting a wireless card for the PC.

Cat5/6 is definitely the best option, but powerline adapters can work. I've successfully used powerline adapters to outhouses over a distance of >70 meters going through 3 consumer units (but there is no mains noise). I've also failed to use them in adjoining rooms on the same ring-main in a house. YMMV.

if you have twisted pair to the office upstairs, this can be connected as a single unfiltered extension from the master. then the router must be on the end of that. it is possible to have a phone on that circuit too, but that requires a dangly fiter.
not usually recommended, because its so much easier to say the router must be off the master socket, and few people know the difference between a single extension filtered in the right place and old fashioned star topology wiring.