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 » Continue Reading.