On 11 April 2017 at 18:06, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
However, I also think that network over mains has a bad reputation.
I have quite a lot of experience of network over mains (my company used to sell it), and generally it works pretty well - certainly when compared with wifi, which is the market it competes in. One issue I've heard with it is how it affects others: a typical UK house has a mains ring, and rings work like antennae broadcasting the signal. Security-wise that's easy to deal with by encrypting (and all devices do this by default as far as I know), however it can mess around with radio ham enthusiasts and therefore isn't particularly liked amongst that group. As I'm not a radio expert I don't know how big a problem it really is (compared with all the other modern radio "noise") though.
As to my own situation: having a cable (or homeplug) to upstairs with a wifi access point there would likely work quite well, although it would (I believe?) then really need to be on a different SSID to work properly. (In a completely unrelated coincidence I spent most of yesterday on site trying to get some devices to reliably connect to a wifi network which comprised multiple access points on one network that really didn't work very well, and that was set up by professionals. It bears out my own experience at home with wifi repeaters and multiple access points and doesn't give me much confidence in success via that route.)
The mesh solutions seem to also allow for the access points to be on cable for improved speed, but work better as a single wifi network. Well that's as much as I've learned from reviews anyway...
However, if you want to play around with mesh, that's moot.
Indeed. Although in the absence of others knowledge to jump start from, I think probably starting with a real "product" as a starting point might be the best (albeit most expensive) way to get started.