Getting 1Gbps Across My House - Options?

[Rodpad]

Current situation:

• 300 year old cottage in the UK
• Recently upgraded from 300Mbps FTTP to 1Gbps FTTP.
• The FTTP fibre cable comes into the 1st floor office, in the rear of the house.
• Consoles, TV, gaming PC are in the ground floor living room, in front of the house.

 

Current constraints:

1. Ethernet - Lengthy planning permission (Grade II listed) and a contractor would be needed. Lack the tools and expertise to drill through house foundations and clip cables across the house neatly. 100% will want a professional to do this properly.
2. Powerline - A pair of TP-Link 2000Mbps Powerline adapters gets me 650Mbps reported in the utility and about 150Mbps in real world testing from downstairs.
3. WiFi - My Billion BiPac 8800AXL R2 router (AC1300) gets about 100-250Mbps with real world testing on my phone in the downstairs living room.

 

Options:

1. Some sort of mega WiFi bridge solution
2. Wait until the quarantine blows over and get a Cat5e or SC cable to go around the external of house from the back upstairs, to the front downstairs.

 

My preference right now would be option 1 as nobody knows how long the quarantine will be in place for. 

 

Budget wise I'd be happy to get a WiFi bridge solution capable of a solid 1Gbps for under £300.

 

Any ideas and thoughts on a temporary WiFi solution in the meantime?

[emosun]

1 minute ago, Rodpad said:

Ethernet - Lengthy planning permission (Grade II listed) and a contractor would be needed. Lack the tools and expertise to drill through house foundations and clip cables across the house neatly. 100% will want a professional to do this properly.

 just run the cables through doors and out windows with sticky mounting clips

[Rodpad]

Not practical I'm afraid.

[Wh0_Am_1]

7 minutes ago, Rodpad said:

Not practical I'm afraid.

Your other option is to gather shell out some serious cash for a better access point, or if you have a large house, a mesh network.

[Rodpad]

Just now, Wh0_Am_1 said:

Your other option is to gather shell out some serious cash for a better access point, or if you have a large house, a mesh network.

So my house is very small, however the walls and floors are very thick due to the age of the building.

I've found it tough to find any WiFi APs/Mesh devices that actually list their true link speed between each other. Will these be able to link at higher than 1Gbps (to allow for any degradation) between each other?

[Wh0_Am_1]

11 minutes ago, Rodpad said:

So my house is very small, however the walls and floors are very thick due to the age of the building.

I've found it tough to find any WiFi APs/Mesh devices that actually list their true link speed between each other. Will these be able to link at higher than 1Gbps (to allow for any degradation) between each other?

The listed access point has a better chance than anything then, as it has enough antennas to properly beam form (basically what occurs is the router uses the additional antennas to reflect the signal in the direction of your device increasing it's wall penetrating power) of course do expect some sort of degradation as the numbers like "AC5400" are merely theoretical, basically it's the combined throughput of all bands when hooked up via coax to a machine, as in real life you are dealing with the inverse square law, obstacles, and interference you will never achieve the listed speeds. (do note you will also want at least a  802.11ac wave 2 adapter to see close to the full connection speed on one device)

[emosun]

5 hours ago, Rodpad said:

Not practical I'm afraid.

 

[Falcon1986]

5 hours ago, Rodpad said:

Any ideas and thoughts on a temporary WiFi solution in the meantime?

For such an old house, how confident are you in the reliability of the wiring? If the house had updated wiring within the last 1-2 decades, you can try Powerline adapters, but the speeds on these are unpredictable and dependent on the quality of the electrical wiring, etc. You won't know until you try it.

 

Since running ethernet doesn't seem to be an option, my recommendation would be to use a mesh WiFi solution. Personally, I prefer wired-in access points, but your situation/constraints seem to be ideal for a mesh system. The nice thing about mesh is that you can move the mesh points around until you get the best coverage and doesn't require wall/ceiling mounting; as long as it can be powered it's totally fine.

 

There are many mesh WiFi reviews online. Here's one from thewirecutter.com and techradar.com. I've heard good things about the Synology router/AP devices.

[Rodpad]

@Falcon1986 Powerline is the current solution I've had in place for a while now.  A pair of TP-Link 2000Mbps Powerline adapters gets me 650Mbps reported in the utility and about 150Mbps in real world testing - so not great.

 

Thanks for your links, very helpful with researching into WiFi bridging with 802.11AX. I found the "Dong Knows Tech" website to be the most informative with detailed comparisons.

 

I've got two Asus Zenwifi AX (XT8) units arriving today. Hopefully it'll get a solid 1Gbps backbone between the two rooms. I'll update as to how this has gone as this is a relatively new product without many real world reviews.

 

 

[seanondemand]

At this point there are very few devices that can get to 1gbps over wifi, even in optimal conditions; as you've been finding out, the marketing departments loooove putting AC5300 on the box but even if theoretically a router can push 1300mbps to a single device you'll be lucky to get 1gbps to a laptop with a proper 3x3 mimo card, 6 feet away from your router with nothing in between. It's a pain, but you'll want to run Ethernet, ideally a couple runs to your switch.