When Wi-Fi Won’t Weach!

I work from home in our study, on a bog standard Dell PC connected to AOL via a Netgear router. Lorna has a nice little MacBook that she uses to surf the net and punish our credit cards from the lounge. All was well with our little wireless network until I added an Apple TV box to the TV in the family room.

I experimented with various positions for the wireless router, but it just didn’t seem to cover all three points very well. I had a look at wireless extenders but nothing seemed to guarantee success. Finally I found these little beauties which proved to be the answer -

the ZyXEL PLA-401 Twin Pack PowerLine HomePlug AV 200Mbps Ethernet Adapters.

Basically, you plug a patch cable from your router into one of the adapters and plug it into a nearby power socket. Then you plug another adapter into a power socket near your device that isn’t within reach of your wi-fi and use a patch cable to complete the Ethernet network. It really was plug and play, nothing else required. Your electrical circuits throughout your house now become a hard wired network! You can have up to 16 adapters around your home.

Most of the reviews on Amazon, e-buyer and Dabs all do recommend buying separate patch cables as the ones supplied tend not to be any good!

Why am I blogging about them? Well it took me months to accidentally stumble onto them, even though they aren’t particularly new, then when I showed them to Happy he said, “Oh yea, I’ve got something similar”; so my months of poor wi-fi could have been sorted a while back with the right knowledge!

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