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Comment by dgzl | Hacker News Reader

For the past year, I've been trying to convince my grandparents to ditch cable for internet TV, and the transition has been surprisingly difficult. After two attempts (I don't live near them), I am still not successful, however I did reduce the TV/phone/internet bundle from $250 to $200. Next time I see them, I'm coming prepared with the items that prevented me from succeeding before, and hopefully I'll be reducing them down to antennae/phone/internet.

The biggest problem I've found is that the cable company installed their cable modem on the entirely opposite side of the house from where the living room is (where the office is), and the wifi signal is too week to stream video. My general options are either a) get a repeater, or b) try setting up a second internet source from the living room cable (not sure if it's internet ready).

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You can also try a MoCA adapter. I've three Motorola 2.0 MoCA devices and they work great; much better speeds than WiFi albeit not as fast as Ethernet (but also without having to run Cat6 throughout the house).

I looked into this, but I don't understand what is different between this anda regular modem/router?

Moca is like short range, high speed cable LAN. My parents house is wired for cable TV but not Ethernet. So the modem is in the basement, and a pair of moca adapters get internet up to the 2nd floor bedroom where there's a wireless access point.

Get a mesh wifi solution like Google WiFi, and spread the other access points around. Much easier than the alternatives and you'll have fast internet throughout the whole house so you can stream video in any room.

Mesh WiFi is costly and probably hard to maintain for elderly people.

A cheap Ethernet cord would fix the problem. Move the router closer to the office.

Uh... my Amplifi is dead simple to setup. I bet the eero and others are as well.

Explaining to an elderly person that you are moving a router to extend the range is much easier than telling them they need a 2nd networking device with mesh networking capabilities.

I've set my parents up with a Fire Stick with Netflix, Sling, Prime, etc.. But the internet in their area isn't that good and the streams cut out frequently. I live 3 hours away and have FIOS, so I typically don't run into issues on my end and can't easily drop by to troubleshoot. It's a hard sell when they are used to always being able to turn on the TV and have something to watch without the frustrations of network issues.

MOCA 2.0 via a Motorola adapter works great for me.

powerline networking is your friend.

Yes it is and while not the fastest, it works surprisingly well. I tried a couple of units several years ago and it was a bust. Some guy locally was giving away two TP-link 1000 plugs and they worked first time and I'm now a believer. Give it a shot.

Just missed the edit window. https://www.tp-link.com/uk/download/TL-PA211_V1.html is the device

This, they have some nice ones with over 900Mbps now out pretty cheap and they work as expected.

last time I checked the "900Mbps" topped out at 200mbit real data

I had the same experience but I did not expect much more from my power installation (a mixture of old and new cabling).

This is still 200 Mbps, better than the Wi-Fi the device could get.

cabling is not the limiting factor, you can link them using plain cable (outside power installation) https://forum.openrov.com/t/teardown-of-a-homeplug-adapter/3...

200Mbps is their real PHY speed, 900Mbps is just a Scam

Ah.

Thanks for the link, it is an impressive article and while I work in IT, the electronic may be a bit off my league (I just solder a bit around IoT devices and flash them).

I realized with your comment that I have never actually tested the plugs when they are next to each other (say, on an extender). I did not expect there would be a physical limitation below the advertized 1Gbps (I now all I got 400 Mbps I think but I am not at home to get that with a local iperf loop). If they cannot deliver close to that I would be pissed off :)

I have, again from memory, a 2x1Gbps tplink pair.

This said, my power cabling is sub par so this was the obvious reason for me for the lower bandwidth.

Last time I tried this I had extreme packet loss if I plugged the two converters into outlets on different breakers, do you know if this is still the case?

I think it depends a lot of the wiring in the house as you've found. I think its normal to work across different circuits though - for me it worked OK. I'd expect newer models to be a bit smarter, but I imagine it doesnt work everywhere. Signal can be killed by some surge protectors & UPS or noisy motors etc.

Is running an Ethernet cable not an option?

Unless both rooms are on the first floor above an unfinished basement it usually isn't.

pulling wire isn't rocket surgery.

It's a pain if you're going down multiple floors. But if you have an attic or basement, it's generally straight-forward.

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