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Bought a condo, need advice

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Silver5656

New Around Here
So I just bought a condo that was built in the early 80's, 10 stories, on the top floor. I am fairly certain the wifi with my ac68r will be very insufficient. The basic design is rectangular aprox 35x80 ft, 3 bedroom + den, 2500 sq feet. All 3 bedrooms are on the left, all in a row, with the den on the right. The den will be my computer/play room with my server, nas, main pc, and my main mac. For a while I've been thinking of setting up cat5e/cat6 but the quotes i've been getting have been 2k+ (for a single run with 5 dropdowns) and as high as 5k (for double runs with 6 dropdowns) so I think that route is not going to work for me.

So my question is, what should I do? I looked into moca and poe but it seems to me at least that there are lots of issues. Should I just get 2 routers and set one up as an AP? I've done this before at my girlfriends parents house (2 stories, 3500sq ft) and it works for their basic needs of internet access and some streaming on a 25mbps plan, but I have a 300/50 plan and I do often max out my speeds. Any help/advice/links would be great. I wish I could just pay the costs and get wired as that would be ideal as many of my devices would like the speed benefits.........but I just cant get myself to commit the money, especially with the other upgrades to the condo that are needed (who am I kidding, they're not really needed) =P
 
How many devices and what's the wired/wireless mix? Where do you want the wireless coverage?

Start with an AC1900 router. Try a pair of HomePlug AV2 MIMO adapters to get Ethernet where you want it. The only thing that will get you 300 Mbps reliably is Gigabit Ethernet. So if you have a choice of where to locate the router, get it into the Den.
 
About 20 devices, but rarely more than 5 connected at a time. I would say 8 are currently wired, 10+ wireless. Ideally I want wireless coverage everywhere, and wired in the den and living room. I should mention that there are coax connects in almost every room, thus getting ethernet in the den is not an issue as that is where I plan on putting my cable modem and router.
 
I'd try one AP on the floor opposite of where the WiFi router is.
Try to centrally located the router and the AP within usage areas.

Condo - you may not be able to run cat5 cable to the AP(s). So in a condo, next-best would be MoCA, then IP over power line. See the forum section.

Don't try to get most of 2500 sq. ft. coverage by spending a lot of WiFi routers and APs. RF is RF.
 
This is a little confusing, do you own the an apartment or the whole building? If you just own the apartment you may want to see about getting some cat5e/cat6 ethernet cabling and just sticking them on the floor/ceiling next to the wall at the corners and try to blend them out of sight if you can or you can just cover everything with some good colour tape.

You can use both a mixture of wifi and wire and if you dont need the full bandwidth you can use switches to minimise cabling (or have a wifi router as an AP and switch)

It really depends on how much performance do you need. If you only need a few megabits per device 2.4Ghz wifi is sufficient, if you need like 100Mb/s than you can go with MOCA but if you need more than gigabit ethernet is much more reliable.
 
Being in a MDU environment and having a very high speed Internet connection and wanting to utilize it without running Cat5e or Cat 6 cable puts you in a tough situation.

You need to experiment with both Moca and Ethernet over powerline to see which gives you the best throughput. You may need to consider using both technologies as certain locations may not be prewired with coaxial cable and in others powerline won't work.

Where Wifi is the only option you will need to use 5 Ghz radios on AC or at least N. With 5 Ghz and its limited range you will need multiple APs. Hopefully they can be linked back to the router with either Moca or powerline.

Avoid trying to stream video using WiFi. If you have no other option consider connecting Smart TVs, Rokus, etc using a wireless media bridge and then plugging the streaming video devices in the LAN ports on the bridge.
 
slim chance: I use "flat" cat5 cables. Good for running under carpet. Under floor molding. Etc.
http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=102&cp_id=10208&cs_id=1020810&p_id=9553&seq=1&format=2
available many colors.

1st to 2nd floor - hard to wire. Sometimes there's a heater air-return that is merely space above the intake vent, to the attic. Fudging to use it for low voltage wire. Be sure to use fire-rated/plenum-rated cable.

else, it's MoCA or IP over AC wiring. Both work OK - my MoCA (over existing TV coax in walls), gives me 70Mbps net yield. That's almost 100BT speeds.
Good enough.
 
It's nearly impossible to place the router in a central-ish location due to the fact that my work desktop, and gaming desktop will be in the den on the far right side of the condo.

I do not own the entire building, just the condo.

Hiding cat5 in the corner between the carpet and the wall is going to be unlikely as there are a lot of floor to ceiling windows with a special metal molding of some sort and the SO shut that idea down.

What kind of real world speeds can I expect with moca and/or powerline?

Avoiding streaming video over wifi is also unlikely as I store my videos on my nas and whs.

Sorry for making this so difficult, this is why I asked here. A lot of hurdles
 
With MOCA v1.1 you can expect speeds of around 70Mb/s. Powerline varies widely depending on the house wiring and what all is plugged in and the interference generated. With the latest generation of powerline I would think you could expect at least 70Mb/s but you could get 200Mb/s. I like MOCA better than powerline because it is generally more stable. Your powerline may work great, then you plug in a vacuum cleaner and your powerline cuts out, etc. Anyway if you do go MOCA you may want to look at MOCA 2.0. It is very hard to get MOCA 2.0 devices right now but if you don't mind using Ebay you can get the Verizon G1100 gateway for about $150 to $175 each. It has MOCA 2.0 that should get around 400Mbit/s. It is kind of expensive for a MOCA device and you would not be using most of its capabilities (you could use the Moca and built in switch part), but it may be worth a look. It also has built in wireless but not sure I would fool with that.
 
With your quest for speed you are going to have to experiment.
I agree that you should start with MOCA. Actiontec equipment is all that is readily available.

For powerline look at the reviews and see what device best seems to meet your requirements then test. Powerline works but is subject to interference. In the home I used to live in every time my wife turned on the disposal my power line link rate dropped by 90%.

After you find the best wired solution compare it to a WiFi link rate using 5 Ghz.

After you have determined what seems like the optimal solution run ping plotter for an extended period of time across the link you are testing to a device connected directly to your router. To stream video you need a stable connection where the latency remains fairly constant.
 
With your quest for speed you are going to have to experiment.
I agree that you should start with MOCA. Actiontec equipment is all that is readily available.

For powerline look at the reviews and see what device best seems to meet your requirements then test. Powerline works but is subject to interference. In the home I used to live in every time my wife turned on the disposal my power line link rate dropped by 90%.

After you find the best wired solution compare it to a WiFi link rate using 5 Ghz.

After you have determined what seems like the optimal solution run ping plotter for an extended period of time across the link you are testing to a device connected directly to your router. To stream video you need a stable connection where the latency remains fairly constant.
 
With your quest for speed you are going to have to experiment.
I agree that you should start with MOCA. Actiontec equipment is all that is readily available.

For powerline look at the reviews and see what device best seems to meet your requirements then test. Powerline works but is subject to interference. In the home I used to live in every time my wife turned on the disposal my power line link rate dropped by 90%.

After you find the best wired solution compare it to a WiFi link rate using 5 Ghz.

After you have determined what seems like the optimal solution run ping plotter for an extended period of time across the link you are testing to a device connected directly to your router. To stream video you need a stable connection where the latency remains fairly constant.
 

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