I'm relatively new to the forums but have been watching TekSyndicate since summer of last year. Anyway, I'll just break down for anyone who can help what the situation is. We have our router in the office and our HTPC in the living room. These two rooms are about 80 ft apart and we need to get ethernet from the office where the router is to the living room where the HTPC is. We need a solution that doesn't involve 100ft of ethernet across the house. I was wondering if there is any possibilities to get Ethernet through the coaxial cable infrastructure that is currently in the house from our router or if there are any other methods of getting ethernet? We really do need ethernet because our Wi-Fi reception in the Living room is awful. Something like 300 kb/s and the rest of the house gets about 20 mb/s. Anyway I don't know much about networking and have been really hoping to learn a lot more about it. Any suggestions would be much appreciated!
P.s.
Also don't know if this is the right place for assistance requests seemed like the best place since it was about networking and internet.
well, yeah, your isp won't do anything beyond the modem. powerline is terrible, and there's no way to route the Ethernet through coax. maybe try a repeater, but the surest option is to route ethernet through the walls or the basement or such.
you may just need a better wifi router, but to go 80 feet, you'd need a pretty good one.
Running a cable would really be the best, but hey.
Your easiest options are to either set up a WiFi repeater or look at powerline adapaters. Wireless Repeaters have their own performance issues due to a re-broadcast of transmissions from one access point to another and although work, they may not give you the performance you desire.
The powerline adapters allow you to use the power infrastructure of your house to send networking signals. This can be very useful for covering distances, however there are several factors that can affect or stop them from working well. If the house is old, the cabling may not be in the best of shape which will degrade performance. If your source and destination are on separate breaker boxes (not separate breakers) they will not work.
If you require faster than 30 Mbps then powerline is not from you. I am deffinitly glad I ran Ethernet through the house. Make the holes for the wall plates was easy but a bit of trial and error drilling through the attic's 2x4 to get between the studs we wanted to.
Google Ethernet to coax and you will find an adapter to allow you to do that. I have to ask though, what kind of house are you in? Do you have an attic or crawlspace? If possible I'd run Ethernet if I were you. Most houses aren't as bad as you would think to have it properly run through the walls.
The only hard part would be navigating through the attic especially if you very low truces like the one in my attic. It was about 3.5 feet at highest part. If you are not claustrophobic and don't mind getting a little dirty it will be a reasonably easy task. Doing it late at night or very early in the morning is best recommended since the attic gets very hot very fast, even on a cool day. Once the sun is up, the temperature will rise quickly.
Powerline might work but you should look for the 500/600 mbit ones. Not because of the speed but they just handle noise and different circuits far better than the older ones.
Second is good placed Ubiquiti Unifi access point. The range is great as is speed but it really helps a lot if you place it correctly
Third option is a line through the crawl space of the house. That way you only have an entry and exit point which you can work away neatly.
Thanks for all the suggestions! I decided it would just be better to have an Ethernet cord run along the ceiling. The power line adapter was a possibility but many said that houses with older wiring, this solution might not be great. Although the Ethernet cord doesn't look the best, it works fine. It'll probably be temporary till I can be bothered setup the whole house with an Ethernet infrastructure later.
No. there is no attic. It's a pueblo revival house in New Mexico. Most don't have an attic.
I did some research on Ethernet-Coaxial converters but nothing made it clear whether a cable or television provider was necessary. All the videos. articles and guides I saw on it made it appear as if a cable provider was necessary for it to work.
No the adapter I mentioned and was linked below do not need cable service. In fact I would presume it's most effective with not TV service going through it as there would be less possible interference. If you want better confirmation find a model that has good reviews and go to the manufacturers site to download the manual or even call the manufacturer and speak to an employee about it.
Edit: Barring random splitters or a need to use the coax, @Critique has a point. Even if you need the coax, if you are willing to spend a little extra effort you could tie a line to the coax, pull it out and the tie the line to both the coax and Ethernet.
Just be warned about the power line mentioned above, they tend to not work well going from one circuit to another. So if all the rooms you need internet are on one circuit it may not be too bad.