I recently had to find and move into a new house. One of the most important things on my list of things to look for in a new house was what broadband was available. I even went as far as to locate the local phone exchange and measure the distance between the prospective property to ensure I was not going to have a degraded ADSL service. With the NBN roll out fast approaching and the prospect of fibre to the home this will become less of an issue in the future.
Once we had chosen our new house the next thing I was determined to do was to ensure I had good network connectivity throughout the entire house. At my last house I never got around to ensuring a had a good network across the house and in the end I kept thinking, don't worry your moving soon. This was PITA and in hindsight I should have just fixed it.
The major issue for good WiFi connectivity across the house is the location of the wireless router with respect to physical distance and the physical mass between the router and your device
My new house is multi story with my home office downstairs and main living area upstairs. My initial thought was that I would connect myBillion BiPAC 7404VNPX ADSL modem / router Wifi to the phone line in my office and work from there, however as I was setting up I noticed that the phone socket in the office was fed from a make shift extension cable which was probably 10 meters long if not longer. This forced me to change my plans. To ensure for a very good internet connection you need to have your ADSL modem as close to the main phone socket in the house.
After a quick change of plans I setup my ADSL Router behind my lounge room TV which is the dead center of the upstairs area of the house. This location proved to be great with an internet connection which runs at 90% capacity 100% of the time. It also provided a surprisingly great wireless coverage throughout the entire house. I did not expect to achieve excellent wireless coverage in my office from the upstairs router and in fact I had initially planned to run a separate wireless device down stairs to ensure this was not a problem.
With a good wireless network in place the last challenge was to ensure a fast connection between my gigabit network upstairs and my gigabit network downstairs where I store my NAS, PC,s and anything else I am working with. The prospect of getting in the roof and running a Cat5 cable down the walls was not very enticing and I didn't want to pay someone or wait for them to do it , therefore I decided to look into an EoP (Ethernet of Power) solution. I have always been a skeptic of this technology, however it was not going away, so I decided it was finally time to give it a chance.
After some quick research I decided to go with the Netcomm NP201AV which provides two plugs both with an Ethernet socket. There was no setup required with these plugs, I simply plugged them in and attached a Cat5 cable to each end. Once connected to the gigabit hub downstairs I had a great connection to the network upstairs, simple as that. I then tested the plugs running from my power boards in an attempt to free up two precious power sockets. For some reason when I had both plugs running through a powerboard I experienced dropouts and connectivity problems, this is most likely due to the internal filtering of the powerboards. I tinkered around and ended up achieving perfect connectivity whilst having 1 plug through a power board which I was satisfied with.
The Netcomm Home Plug devices provide a theoretical bandwidth of 200MBPS however it is generally far slower than that. I am yet to give it a good test to see the true bandwidth of this solution, however it seems fast enough and streams 1080p blue ray movies from my Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ to my WDTV Live without missing a beat so am happy with the solution. It is also yet to drop out or have any connection problems what so ever.
I am now very happy with my home network and internet connection and have learnt that I should have taken the time to do this in the past as it has stopped me having to work around connectivity black spots and problems, saving time and providing extra functionality. Below is a quick and nasty network diagram I threw together to share my final result.
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