Question Mesh network or Power line adapter + additional router?

[fatalshot808]

Hello I came here for some advice. I am helping my friend with their poor network performance at their house. Their upstairs living room has a good signal but the two downstairs bedrooms have a poor signal. Would a power line adapter and an additional router be the better option? I've never really played around with mesh systems so I'm not too sure how well they perform.

 

[bill001g]

In general powerline and a second router...running as a AP will be better. If you have coax cables in both room MoCA is a much better option.
Mesh is very hit and miss with no way to predict if it works good in most houses. It take careful placement so it can get good signal from the main router and still send the signal to the remote room. This is very tricky when you have wall and ceilings in the path. Mesh/repeater you pay a large performance penalty in exchange for coverage. You really want mesh systems that have extra radios for the back haul connection. This makes the units more expensive but it helps with the performance.

Powerline might be slower than a mesh system. You might get 130mbps or so on depending on the wiring in the house. That should be good enough for most things. The key benifit of powerline over wifi is the latency is consistent on powerline. Wifi does error correction and when it gets interference you can get latency spikes. This only really matters for online game most other application can tolerate these spikes.

 

[fatalshot808]

The reason I went power line personally

In general powerline and a second router...running as a AP will be better. If you have coax cables in both room MoCA is a much better option.
Mesh is very hit and miss with no way to predict if it works good in most houses. It take careful placement so it can get good signal from the main router and still send the signal to the remote room. This is very tricky when you have wall and ceilings in the path. Mesh/repeater you pay a large performance penalty in exchange for coverage. You really want mesh systems that have extra radios for the back haul connection. This makes the units more expensive but it helps with the performance.

Powerline might be slower than a mesh system. You might get 130mbps or so on depending on the wiring in the house. That should be good enough for most things. The key benifit of powerline over wifi is the latency is consistent on powerline. Wifi does error correction and when it gets interference you can get latency spikes. This only really matters for online game most other application can tolerate these spikes.

Oh I think I've seen a LTT video on MoCa but completely forgot about it! I'm going over to their house tonight and taking my power line adapter to do some testing on how well it works. So setting the secondary router as an access point I would have to put the secondary router in bridge mode?

I was thinking since he will get a gaming PC shortly too he could use Ethernet from the secondary router. Honestly I hate gaming on Wifi the jitter at times is noticable and does affect game play. I think he's fine with the speed the main thing is there are not any connectivity issues. My power line at home maxes out at 100mbps while we have 200 Mbps internet but it's completely fine with me.

Thanks for your advice! I'll try to avoid Mesh systems when possible.