Same here. Works fine across floors but only 90Mbps.

Repeater didn't work between my basement office to the upstairs flat. So I used power-line adapter for several years with no problems.

For some reason it short-circuited one day (I think it was the old socket though, not the device) and my landlord sponsored a LAN line between the floors after I mentioned it. As one of my computers is not operated via wlan that's perfect for me. But I'd use power-line again anytime.

Bumping this to see if advice has changed. I was debating buying an extender for FIL's house (not in CH) as it's quite a long house and the signal doesn't reach all the way back to our room.

I suppose it is a bit of a Faraday-cage, in that there's a stucco wall in between the main part of the house and the guest part. However in the front room of the guest part (by the big sliding doors) we can get wifi most of the time. I was thinking of buying an extender to take along and try. I assume I'd plug it in on the guest side?

What should I look for in an extender? Ideally we don't want to lose too much speed because FIL streams a lot. Thus why changing the router to 2.4 GHz is probably not an option. We've got points to use at Fust so that would be practical.

Thanks for any suggestions.

There's a recent thread here

Gah, caught again by the rusty search function, which doesn't show that thread because "repeater" is not a tag (I'll fix that) and it's in sequence with a slash. Thanks for the link.

If ever one can avoid using the powerline extenders, avoid using them. They create a *lot* of radio frequency pollution as a direct byproduct of their design and use, and this Radio Frequency Interference makes it really difficult for others that listen to e.g. shortwave radio or ham radio to pursue their interests.

It's akin to putting flashing searchlights on the balcony and roof and having that screw with night time photographers and astronomers.

The powerline extenders work by putting a lot of radio energy onto the home wiring circuits which are unshielded and untwisted. Any time radio frequency energy is put onto unshielded wires it gets radiated away - this is exactly how radio antennas work. The frequencies that the powerline devices use are slap-bang in the same frequencies that ham radio people use (2 MHz to ~100MHz), and the powerline devices are not licensed to radiate in those frequencies. A side effect of poor quality cabling (from a radio point of view, it would be fine for 50Hz mains) in the house means that some of the radio energy put onto the wire will be re-radiated at a different frequency, making the installations illegal. It doesn't help that the majority of powerline devices are poorly manufactured with low quality filters in them.

To answer the OP's question, there are Wifi extenders that do not use the powerline, and these will work much better than the powerline stuff almost every time, as the Wifi has a much larger (licensed) block of frequencies at a much higher range of frequencies.