Please don’t. All high powered WiFi does is make things worse for everyone. More access points at standard power is always better than one really powerful one.
Just wanted to toss an update here. I’m going to give powerline networking a try. I just got my box in last night. Hopefully it’ll work wonders.
The Eero guys sweetened the pot for their add-on service. They were charging $10 per month for router-based security and web filtering (simple DNS based family controls), and I didn’t see enough value in that.
This week they added three family-sized licenses to their service: 1Password, Malwarebytes, and Encrypt.me. It’s not exactly integrated into their hardware—these are simply negotiated partner license arrangements—but the deal is quite nice. For the same $10/mo, you get something like 3 licenses for each of these services.
They also added a beta version of network-based ad blocking, just turn it on and many ads get replaced with an innocuous placeholder image, for all devices that use your network.
I’m giving it the one month trial, and am enjoying the basic filtering and ad blocking. Note that the filtering is similar to OpenDNS, in that it simply overrides your regular DNS to answer DNS lookups with filtering applied. The plus is that it happens in the firewall. A smart 11-year-old can still defeat it, but I like it because I can filter malware sites and hate sites on my own devices.
The VPN service is particularly nice, it uses an app to automatically switch to VPN on any untrusted network. I was pleased to look at my iPad in church and see the VPN indicator had come on, so I could have done safe banking from the pew if desired. Again, this does not have any Eero special sauce, and you can’t use it to connect to your home network from elsewhere, it is simply the rebranded Cloak VPN service from Encrypt.me.
I will definitely use the Malwarebytes licenses on my Windows machines. Not sure about 1Password since we already use the standalone app without a need for their service.
Some good ideas being tossed around here – let us know what you finally end up with. My general comment is that sometimes a multi-faceted approach is needed instead of relying on a single silver-bullet solution – for example, wired connections at some locations, a powerline link at another, and maybe a distributed AP topology or something like the Google mesh network everywhere else. Your experiment with powerline adapters would be an example of that.
That’s just what I did when I had some Wi-Fi issues in some spots. My main computer is co-located with the cable modem and wired directly into the adjacent router. A second important computer is unfortunately two floors down in the basement. It’s not practical to run Ethernet all the way and in my case powerline didn’t work well, either, because the circuits were on different sides of the distribution panel (may or may not be an issue with the latest generation, I don’t know). So that one is done with a wireless bridge, just because it’s much more sensitive than any typical wireless adapter. I suppose I could have tried a repeater or an AP at some convenient location, but with the bridge in place, it wasn’t necessary.
OTOH on the main floor where the TV is, and where wireless totally sucks from the upstairs location, powerline does work well for streaming connections to the router, so that’s what I use there.
Everywhere else, for tablets, phones, and laptops, the Wi-Fi is good enough.