OpenRift wrote on 2024-02-23, 18:56:
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Let me elaborate on the situation: My computers are set up in my room. The router is hooked up all the way downstairs, in my dad's office. I know he's not gonna let me run an ethernet cable across the house for this, so my options are limited.
As one of those dads, I understand 😉
I don't know if we have any old routers. I think I can sort of see what you're getting at, but I'm honestly running out of places to plug stuff into and space to put things. I can probably ask about if we still have it, but I don't know.
I thing you see correctly. The old router sits on top of the Wi98 PC, or somewhere convenient within range of a short network cable. Not all routers can do this (in particular, things supplied by internet providers tend not to), but a lot can. It's an option in any event.
Worst case scenario, if this ICS thing doesn't work, I might just buy a powerline adapter and try my luck with that.
That's a whole different kettle of fish (and one I could elaborate on far beyond the scope of this topic, I used to be responsible for managing a few hundred thousand of those things). TLDR: YMMV. A lot depends on your home's electricity network and the devices on it. The former differs - a lot - per country and on the age of your house (with the situation in NL in houses built prior to 1997 taking my vote for 'worst-case scenario' ), the latter is a crapshoot because almost any device could cause interference and it's very difficult to make a-priori guesses how that will influence stability and/or performance.
The one factor you might know/be able to find out that is very relevant to both chance of getting a good connection and on good performance if you have one, is whether or not both power outlets are earthed/grounded. If they are (i.e. you can plug things in with three pins: live, neutral and earth/ground), chances are very good. To make use of that you need to choose adapters with MIMO support (i.e. they also send data over earth/ground+neutral as well as over live+neutral), a task made more difficult by massive obfuscation of specs by chipset and adapter vendors. "1200Mbps" or "2000Mbps" should however usually give you MIMO (unless the adapters support the latest G.hn wave 2 spec in which case you need "2400Mbps"). Just don't expect to get those speeds in actual throughput. On average, 70k devices with "1200Mbps" spec actually reached about 55Mbps, although over 110Mbps on average with earthed connections.
If you can get something old and cheap to try out, it's possible to pretty accurately predict how newer, better kits might work.