Possibly TL/DR and I wont be offended if it is too much for you to be bothered reading.
WRT your physical situation, I know i mentioned it, but this is exactly what the powerline/Mesh hybrids are for.
The current generation of powerline are much more effective.
With our old cheap TP-Link Powerline, we did notice a significant loss compared to what we got directly from the router.
They used One wire transmission, just the live or neutral.
The latest gen use multiwire transmission, in the UK this utilises Live Neutral and Ground. Many also have a pass through socket, the idea being that you plug the node into the wall, then plug appliances/multi-adaptors into The node which has built in filters to reduce interference. They Recommend you do not plug anything into the wall socket beside the node (rather, use the passthrough) to avoid interference from said appliances which can impact the powerline datarates.
So Theres approx 12m/40ft walking distance between our router/main hybrid adaptor and our furthest node at the opposite end of the house. I say walking distance because obviously, God knows how much wire length that amounts to.
Additionally the nodes have two ethernet Plugs each, so you can plug devices like PCs or laptops directly in.
We see full router wifi speeds of 100Mb/s at the furthest node. We're Apparently due for a Gigabit upgrade soon.
The Downside is that hi performance with hybrids come with high cost. The Devolo Magic 2 Wifi 6 we bought was £349 ($412 USD at current exchange rate). That consists of the main base unit that plugs into your router (non wifi), plus 2 nodes.
I'm actually intending to buy a third Devolo standalone node (which can also act as a wifi enabled base unit.) so I can replace the non wifi adaptor at the node, then turn off the routers wifi and just use the Devolo Mesh wifi which is cloned to the SSID of the router.
Then I'll use the non wifi adaptor to provide a link to our security camera DVR box.
So cons of this system:
- expensive
- depends on amount of wiring between base unit and nodes.
- depends on quality of wiring
- I find, occasionally, that because the router still provides the main Wifi at one end of the house, the Mesh isnt as effective as switching automatically been the main router and the node network as the nodes are at switching between each other. This is why I want to get a third adaptor.
- they give you a cat 5 cable to go between the router and the base unit. I just read something that said for max performance you actually need to use a cat 6 or 7, which I didnt even know was a thing.
Pros
- works like a charm taking into accout the above AND as long as you follow their recommendations WRT using the pass throughs and not plugging anything else into the other socket of the wall outlet pair.
-Super simple Setup. You Basically plug them all into together in the same room and they detect each other and sync. You then move them where you need them. If you want to clone the router SSID via WPS, you only need to do it on one unit and the rest sync their settings from it.
In summary, if you're happy running cat cable everywhere, well.. that's gona be bombproof isn't it? But a lot of work.
The Hybrid Powerline Mesh Wifi 6 units (doesn't have to be Devolo) save a lot of hassle, and powerline itself has come a long ways since the previous gen.
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