Paul’s Tech Makeover: Powerline Networking (Premium)

While I still plan to wire Ethernet into my home office, I’m experimenting with Powerline networking in the furthest reaches of the house. And while it’s still early, I think this may solve a problem that, granted, is a bit unique to my situation.

To understand that situation, let’s go back to the beginning: Three years ago, we bought a family home in Pennsylvania. Months before we moved, I arranged for RCN Internet---basically, our only viable choice in this area---and installed a three-node Google Wifi mesh networking solution. So that was waiting for us when we finally did move, in August.

I chose mesh networking because this house is large, about half again as big as the house we left in Massachusetts, and wiring it for Ethernet would be a daunting and expensive task. (Related, I wasn’t sure which rooms my wife would use for our home offices at first either.) And I chose Google Wifi because it was so simple to set up and use.

For the most part, the Internet situation has been solid. The 330 Mbps down/30 Mbps up advertised speed of my RCN connection is a far cry from the 800/800 I was getting from FIOS in Boston (and the 1 Gbps/1 Gbps I’d be getting now), and it goes up and down at times, performance-wise, but it’s been fine. Google Wifi has been spectacular.

When we moved into the house, we needed to put the RCN router in a corner of the first floor, but this wasn’t ideal, so I had the company come in and rewire it so that it could be placed behind the TV in the living room, which is almost dead-center in the house (which is a basic rectangle aside from the sunroom, which juts off the back). Then, I placed the three Google Wifi nodes in a vertical line, with one each on the top floor (in a bedroom that my wife uses for her office), in the living room behind the TV, and in the finished part of the basement.

At the time, this layout seemed to make sense, and we had a solid Wi-Fi signal pretty much everywhere in the house. The only possible exception was the far corner of the sunroom, which is about as far as you can get from any of the Google Wifi nodes, and the back patio, which is right off of the sunroom. But the Internet worked in those locations too, so whatever.

When the pandemic first triggered the work-from-home situation we’re still dealing with now, I started repeatedly experiencing poor Internet connectivity. I had been planning to install Ethernet into this room at some point, which could/should be relatively easy because the main Google Wifi node is right behind a wall that borders the office and living room and is over the unfinished part of the basement. (Part of what held this up was my company’s requirement that I make the office more appealing for podcasts, so I wasted some time reorganizing the layout and backdrop that viewers see.) But trying times call for action, so I just laid wire on the floor and connected a switch in my office to a switch in the living room that is connected t...