Two-hop mesh vs Powerline?

[LoftyGoals]

I'm rewiring a house built in New York in 1930 (brick exterior, wood interior) in which Powerline behaves well, but not great. I'm considering switching to a combination of a wired backhaul and "something else" for one or two hard-to-reach low-priority areas. I'm trying to decide whether the something else should be Powerline (say TP-Link AV2000) or a hop of a Ubiquiti Mesh (i.e. UAP-AC-M).

The question is: would you expect better performance from a pair of AC2000 Powerline adapters or an extra hop of UAP-AC-M?

Here's a more specific version of the question:

• 2-story house plus backyard and basement.
• Each floor and the backyard are ~20' x ~100' (i.e. well within the range of a single AP if there is no interference).
• The 2nd floor is effectively cut in half by a WiFi "wall" consisting of a ceramic tile wall, stove, refrigerator, dishwasher, washing machine, and dryer.
• Unless someone convinces me otherwise, the installation will have five WiFi regions: FL2Front, FL2Back, FL1 (below F2Front and FL2Back), FL1Yard (behind FL1), and FL0 (below FL1).
• I can hit FL0, FL1, FL2Front, and maybe FL2Back with a wired backhaul.
• The two remaining regions (FL2Back, FL1Yard) seldom see anything other that web browsing (i.e. no streaming video or gaming), but even so shouldn't be annoyingly sluggish.

So, more specifically: if you were connecting FL1Yard (via FL1) and FL2Back (via FL2Front) to the backhaul, would you expect pairs of Powerline adapters or pairs of UAP-AC-M to behave less badly?

 

[thiggins]

I need a diagram, including where you propose to install everything.
Even with that, I could not give you a definitive answer. Depends on how new your
power wiring is, what your RF environment is like.

 

[System Error Message]

latency, powerline will be better. bandwidth, if you use wifi AC it will be better but that only is if it is a good setup (the right antennas, dual radio APs, etc)

 

[sfx2000]

two hops over wifi - each hop halves the bandwidth, and each hop will add some latency...

that being said - wifi's footprint, depending on needs, is likely better than one thinks - one might be able to cover and get better performance on the single hop - this is what the MESH devs think these days...

PowerLine is nice, as it's a scheduled MAC, and there is decent QoS on that link, but real-world perf is much lower than what vendors promise...

I have an AV1200 span, the real world link is 500Mbps (as per their utility) or so, and network perf is around 100-120 Mbps at the application layer...

Nothing beats a hard wired CAT5 ethernet connection at the end of the day...

But HomePlugAV and MOCA can work...