Full Fibre 900 + Powerline adapters + Poor WiFi

[stuuz]

Hello,

We've just moved into a new build home which came pre-wired with BT full fibre 900. The modem and router are cabled in a cupboard under the stairs in the hallway, and there are no ethernet connections pre-wired in the property.

I've signed up to complete WiFi, so have a single disc for now, but plan on adding the other 2 as soon as I work out how to request them from BT. The one we have I've stuck up in a 3rd floor bedroom to provide better WiFi up there, as well as an ethernet port to plug in our 16yo's PC. Initial impressions were very good, running a speed test on the wired PC upstairs was yielding download speeds in excess of 400mbps, which I'm more than happy with based on 2 floors between the disc and the hub.

However, general WiFi speeds on the ground floor for our devices are shocking. The hub is smack bang in the centre of the house, and our Sky Q boxes are constantly stopping streaming to buffer, and my laptop which used to easily fetch > 100mbps on WiFi on our old virgin connection is currently seeing speeds of around 12mbps in the office which is only 2 or 3 metres from the hub.

I also have my own PC running on ethernet via a pair of 1gbps rated powerline adapters from tp-link, which used to max out our old 200mbps internet connection from Virgin. However, here I've not seen speeds much in excess of 100mbps, which seems very strange as I'd expect them to be closer to 4-500mbps. I doubt it's the wiring in the house as it's brand new, so is there some limitation on the BT hub that's capping my speeds over powerline? I was planning on purchasing faster ones until we consider running ethernet cables properly, but I'm reluctant to spend the cash if they won't perform any better than the ones I already have.

I thought maybe the hub is configured to prioritise bandwidth to the wifi discs, but if I connect a long ethernet cable from my PC directly to the hub I'm maxing out at 900+mbps.

Has anyone successfully managed to obtain a speed close to that 900mbps through powerline adapters? I see there are 2000mbps ones available now?

Cheers,

Stu

[mabuk]

If the Virgin hub was not in a cupboard under the stairs the discrepancy in wifi performance is partially explicable, since that's one of the worst locations for a router.

You might want to try the one disc at a midpoint between the hub and where you want the signal to go so that it's receiving a stronger signal before bouncing it on. I also think that powerline adapters work best when they're on the same wiring loop, so if they're now plugged into different sockets that might explain the drop in performance. Hopefully someone with first hand experience with those new adapters will chime in.

To max out your connection wirelessly with PC you might need to go wi-fi 6 at both ends.