Wish they could wire houses with fibre optic for cable and ethernet outlets in every room. Wonder what that would cost?
You can have essentially that, for surprisingly little. What follows is something I wrote for another forum, but you might find it very interesting.
I have a rather large home, with two floors, and I have an office upstairs at one end of the house, and my wife has an office downstairs at the other end of the house.
I was using Wi-Fi to connect the two offices until recently. I finally got tired of fighting with the router, the extender, etc. to keep things working smoothly.
Let me tell you about the fairly inexpensive wired solution that I came up with, that didn't require me to re-wire my home with networking cable. I installed a powerline network. Basically, a powerline network uses the existing electrical wiring in your walls to carry Ethernet. It took all of about 20 minutes to install, and just about no effort or technical skill.
I purchased two of these Logitech kits that someone told me about (and raved about) for $25 each from OWC (they've since gone up to $38.75, still a tremendous bargain; the SRP is $140).:
Logitech HD Powerline 200a Starter Kit
Ethernet Powerline Bridge Mac / PC
$38.75
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Logitech/930000131/
They showed up three days later.
I purchased two kits. Each kit came with two identical adapters (for a total of four). There is no specialized "transmitter" or "receiver;" each adapter is interchangeable. The kits also each come with two RJ45 Ethernet cables. The cables are on the flimsy side, and I was tempted to substitute higher quality Ethernet cables, but I didn't know if there was anything special about the cables that came with the kit for use with powerline adapters, so I stuck with them.
Setup couldn't have been much easier. (Describing it takes more time than actually setting things up!) The instructions (which were almost superfluous) said to plug the devices directly into an electrical socket, not into any kind of strip, extension, or surge protector. I don't know how important this is, but to be sure I purchased four cheap surge strips at WalMart and aggregated everything that was previously plugged into each outlet onto the surge strip, and used the other plug in the outlet to directly plug in the powerline device. The devices are a bit bulky, so it's best to put them in the bottom socket so that the top socket remains unobstructed.
I plugged one device into an electrical socket near my cable modem/router, and ran the included Ethernet cable from the modem/router to the powerline device. I then went to the other end of the house (and downstairs) and plugged three powerline devices into three different outlets. I then ran an Ethernet cable from each device to a computer.
There are no drivers that need to be installed, for Mac or for Windows. All that I had to do was turn Wi-Fi off on each of the three computers in the remote room. (One of which is a Toshiba Windows laptop. The Powerline adapters don't care what type of networkable device you use them with.) Beyond that, no configuration was necessary, even on the Windows box. All three computers instantly and automatically recognized that they were connected via hard wire to the Internet, and performance was excellent!
Notes: These kits apparently are on clearance because powerline adapters are going to Gigabit Ethernet and the ones that I purchased are only rated as "Fast Ethernet" or 100base-T. That's not lightning fast, but it's decent.
How well these powerline devices work for you depends on several things. The distance transversed (shorter equals faster), the number of switches between devices (the fewer the faster), the quality of your copper powerlines (newer is better), and how much interference there is in your house. Washing machines and cordless phones, for instance, have been known to cause problems for some folks (but caused no problems in my installation). Of course, there are similar factors limiting Wi-Fi; some of them are even the same, and they can have a more severe detrimental effect for Wi-Fi.
The Logitech adapters that I got have two-prong plugs. That means that you don't need three prong outlets to use them. The downside, I understand, is that powerline adapters that use three prongs tend to be faster.
The bottom line is that these Logitech powerline adapters work, they work nicely, and they are a tremendous value. Unlike Wi-Fi, internet access in my house now works instantly, every single time. There is never any re-training, need to reset anything, or unexpected down-time.
If you want the best performance possible, and you don't mind spending more money, you can get powerline adapters that will give you better performance, especially if your have cable modem service and computers that support Gigabit Ethernet. See:
http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-powerline-networking-kit/
But I'm deliriously happy with what I have.
I have to say, that I half expected the powerline adapters not to work. Those of you who are in my age range (or older) may remember the days when devices that "use your powerlines as one huge antenna for better reception on your TV" were advertised on television late at night. Like many other dupes, I got one, and it didn't work. I had visions of the same experience when I was setting these powerline adapters up. Especially given their drastically reduced price. I was more than a little surprised (but very pleasantly) that they worked, that they worked without any fiddling whatsoever, and that they worked really well.
