We live in a fairly rural neighborhood and just had our internet upgraded and finally have 1GB speeds offered. Hardline comes in via coax into master bedroom and the company (optimum) provided our modem/router combo…

Our house isn't wired for cat5, etc and I would love to have a better connection for my Xbox/computer in another room in the house. The tech mentioned these power line extenders where the host unit plugs into router then electrical outlet supposedly sending signal throughout the electrical lines in the house and I can plug a satellite in and then connect it my Xbox "hardwire."

Can anyone provide feedback on these and suggestions, and also should I keep their modem or would I see a noticeable speed upgrade if I bought something higher end? TIA!

Powerline adaptors work great for what you are describing. They will get you a stable "wired" connection between your modem/router and where you need it.

The downside is around how old your house is and what speed degradation you will see will just be trial and error. I had some AC2000 hardware that worked well and I could get 130 mb/s, that's megabits. To compare that was about half what I was paying for, but pretty good for my purposes.

I have a TP-Link AC-1200 powerline extender model TL-WPA8630 that has both an Ethernet port and a wireless access point. It works very well.

For stationary objects like smart tv and gaming systems, is there any benefit to using WiFi instead of Powerline?

Unless it's some sort of huge house wifi is the way to go nowadays, running your own home network using one node/router plugged into the cable-company provided box. A lot of new/future devices won't even have cat5 plugs on them moving forward (streaming for TV's, sound systems etc).

2 or 3 mesh router systems I'll defer to someone else to make a recommendation as...those seem to change every 6 months and I dunno now which is best...

A Wifi 6 compatible wireless router or mesh network is going to be faster (latency and bandwidth) than a power-wire adapter.

Dropping a cat5e or cat6 line is pretty easy and will get you the best performance, but I've been very pleased with wifi 6.

OldArmy07 said:

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A Wifi 6 compatible wireless router or mesh network is going to be faster (latency and bandwidth) than a power-wire adapter.

Dropping a cat5e or cat6 line is pretty easy and will get you the best performance, but I've been very pleased with wifi 6.

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This. If you have a strong signal to begin with you can setup a mesh network or Wifi 6 access points around the house. They are pretty easy to setup and typical are done with an app on your phone.

It's not too expensive to drop in cat5 or cat6 lines either. You could probably find someone local to come in and do it if you don't want to yourself. I dropped in cat5e about 10 years ago myself. It wasn't too bad. I just ran it from my router to a switch downstairs. That was the hardest part. It was easy to run cable from the switch.

Good luck!