Bit of a niche inquiry, this…we’re turning the tin shed in our back yard into an office/girl shed for the Mem, and my thoughts have turned to t’internet. We have a 5G wifi dongle, about the size of an iPhone, which dispenses wifi goodness round the house just fine, but doesn’t reach the shed in any useful way, particularly for Zoom meetings and the like. We’ve experimented with taking the dongle to the shed, which works fine but leaves me without wifi in the man cave – I can hotspot off my phone, but it’s a bit hit and miss, so I get cranky, which obviously we want to avoid.
Which is why I’m wondering about powerline adaptors. Do they do the job, and do it all the time? The dongle has an ethernet socket so I’ll be able to plug the base station in OK, but do they actually work with 5G dongles? Does anybody indeed have experience of 5G dongles? They’re magical pieces of kit, but there’s a lot I don’t know about how they work. I read somewhere that the powerline base station can interfere with the workings of a modem/router, but I don’t know whether that applies to dongles.
Finally, any recommendations? Techradar favours the Devolo Magic 2, but that’s not available in Oz. The TP-Link AV2000 is also well thought of and available on Amazon Oz for a decent price, although there are a fair few disgruntled customers who say it’s rubbish.
Any thoughts gratefully received.
Are you sure you can risk anything 5G, being much closer to China than a lot of people?
Well Bill Gates has assured me that everything will be just fine, and I’m happy with that.
If the 5G dongle has an Ethernet socket, is there any chance you can run an Ethernet cable to the shed? Screwfix sell outdoor Ethernet cable for about 30p a yard.
My experience of Powerline adaptors was not a positive one. There’s no agreed standard and the level of digital mush they chuck out varies greatly. Mains power wiring is not designed to carry fast data, so the sender unit chucks high-levels of data down the wire in the hope that some of it dribbles out of the other end. But all of that data that doesn’t make it goes into the ether.
I found the FM/DAB radios in my house stopped working, and my turntable peramp did that – you know the sound a mobile phone makes in the car? – dur-dur-der-der-der, well, that All the time.
I sent the powerline units back and ran an Ethernet cable upstairs.
I’m guessing a tin shed won’t have great 5G reception.
May I echo that experience? I found Powerlines promised much more than they deliver – especially if your electrics are not one fully integrated circuit. Running an Ethernet through the cellar to the back of the house solved all my problems.
Powerline is very hit-and-miss if the power sockets used aren’t on the same circuit. Especially if your fusebox circuits are RCD protected, which most are these days. Even when it does work it’s not as reliable as Ethernet, but then nothing else is. I tried using Powerline briefly and concluded it was a waste of my money. Better to use ethernet where you can.
Presumably your dongle will be plugged into your primary device via USB. If the dongle has an ethernet socket, then plugging something else with ethernet into it should work just fine. Use the dongle where the 5G signal is best and cable to where you use the other device. You can use an ethernet switch to share the connection to more than one place if necessary.
Like what you did there Fenton with your sheds and yards. (;
I bought a powerline adaptor to give me Internet in the garage at the bottom of the garden. It just about worked for downloading web pages or music streaming. It was very much an ‘or’ though. It worked fine in the house on the same circuit but the garage (and presumably your shed, was a distance away, on another circuit and the other side of an RCD.
Depending on distances involved, I would consider putting a WiFi Mesh device as near to the outside wall nearest the shed and put it as high as possible. You don’t need the latest technology so ebay may be the place to look.
My solution was to buy a new house with a garage within WiFi range of the house!…. there may have been other reasons!
Well the tin shed will be lined and insulated by the time we’ve finished, so there’s that…
But thanks for that, chaps – just the sort of experience-based evidence I was hoping for. We’ve used a long ethernet cable in the past and it’s worked fine, it’s just that I was hoping for something a bit more elegant and 21st century. It can go down through the floor and under the house, but eventually it’ll have to make its way across a garden bed and a fair amount of concrete, through the wall and to the far end of the shed, which is where Mrs thep has decided she wants her workspace. Somewhere between 40-50m, I’d say. Is that too far?
That length should be fine. One of the keys is to make sure you have good connections so buy the right tools.
CAT5 cable will carry 1 Gigabit up to 100m.
Most cable now is (better-spec) CAT6A, which will carry 1 Gigabit to 500m.
5G is maximum data rate of 10 Gigabit per network cell, so I’d be very surprised if your 5G can do 1 Gigabit. Those 10 Gb of data will be shared between you and your neighbours, and anyone else in the area with a 5G phone.
For comparison, I have a 120Mbit connection to my house, and four of us can be watching HD video simultaneously.
10 Gigabit per network cell per what? Not that it matters – there’s only two of us, and it’s very unusual to get any sort of slowdown on anything we want to do, although Zoom meetings can stutter a bit when the local kids get home from school.
Anyhow, ethernet cable it is. Mrs thep is happy – she was a bit suspicious of my trying to involve her in voodoo electronics.
Thanks for the help all.
Per second. So 10Gb/s, or 10Gbps, in nerd speak.
They have worked ok for me in my (fairly small) house, although one or two less well now after 5 or 6 years. May need to replace
Niche queries appears to be your forte Thep but the right angle valve connector is still your triumph.
Right-angle ethernet connectors…
Funny you should say that, Junior. The power to the shed appears vertically out of the slab in a spot which is no good for the new configuration (we’ve moved one wall back to create a verandah). The cable needs to run up a post to enter the shed at roof height. After discussions with the sparks it’s been decided that what we need are – you guessed it – a couple of bits of right angle trunking…
I had them. My house has been extended a few times in the past and getting even wifi coverage is impossible, even with BT Meshed Wifi (it’s not bad, but not great). I had Devolo extenders and they worked OK, both the wifi ones and the ones with an ethernet port. As others have said though, they are very dependent on the underlying wiring. The control panel utility is good, and I was able to significantly improve performance by using different plug sockets in the same room – presumably because of some arcane compromise in the wiring made 20 years ago. Anyway, I gave up on them and got BT Meshed during lockdown for work reasons, but as I say it was still spotty so I gave up in the end and ran a CAT 7 cable from the router to the distant family room and with a little intelligent switch I now drive two PCs, a smart TV and an XBox and it’s brilliant. Even the boy, never backward in coming forward with complaint, is happy. Go wired. You won’t regret it.
Is there any reason after your second sentence you suddenly switched to Estonian?
Arf!
Beyond me too.
I don’t understand Lodes’ response.
Mina ka mitte…
I have TPlink powerline adapters in a couple of rooms in the house, and one in the shed at the bottom of the garden. Weirdly, the one in the shed works better than the one in my bedroom (which is in the basement). I’ve tried figuring out why this is and failed completely. Anyway, the shed gets download speeds of – let me go and check – 40Mbps. Which seems perfectly adequate to me.
The thing I find completely unhelpful is that there doesn’t seem to be an obvious and easy way of figuring out which powerline adapter I’m actually connecting to. On the TPLink app all the adapters have their own MAC address, but my IPhone only shows something called a Wi-Fi Address which seems to bear no relation to the MAC address.
I have a couple of Netgear jobs – one because the wifi in my TV is forever falling out so I need an ethetrnet connection from the plug to the telly, and one because Virgin’s guarantee of minimum 30MB in every room does not include my Carport (apparently).
(Still in conversation about that one … the Carport and Garage are part of my house so should therefore be covered by their guarantee)
They do the job pumping out the requisite 1s and 0s so I can sit in the carport and make daft comments on this site
(like this one for example)
That’s all pretty conclusive, thanks. It’s interesting that the sources of online wisdom – Techradar etc – don’t mention ethernet cables as an acceptable substitute. But in the real world…)
I imagine you know but you can get an armoured tube duct thingy to run it outside.
Mrs thep has briskly dismissed any cunning plans along those lines – when she knocks off each day she’ll merely roll it up and tuck it under the house. It’ll stay plugged in at the dongle end. No doubt the plug will give up the ghost at some point, but hey ho.