The PC Is in the Wrong Room for the Router

The router sits where the line enters the house, which is usually the hall, and the PC sits where there is room for a desk, which is usually not the hall. Everything below exists because of the distance between those two facts.

So the organising principle here is not speed. Each item removes one specific obstacle: there is no route for a cable, or there is no signal in the room, or there is signal in the room but not at the machine, or there is one cable and several things that need it. Throughput barely appears, because throughput is rarely what actually fails — consistency is.

They are also in order. The first one is the answer more often than people want it to be, and each step after it is a concession to a constraint the previous one could not get past.

A note on this collection: these are chosen from published specifications and from where the difficulty appears in a house, not from installing each of them in this room. Powerline especially behaves according to wiring nobody can see in advance. See how we test.

This page contains affiliate links. If you buy through them, Ugly Fixes may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Products are selected independently.

A flat Ethernet cable, run properly

The answer most people skip, and the one that beats everything else on this page on every measure that matters.

The objection is never technical. It is that a cable across a landing looks terrible — which is a real objection, and a flat cable is the thing that answers it. It sits under a carpet edge or along a skirting board under a self-adhesive raceway, and once it is in you stop thinking about the network.

Buy longer than you measure. The route a cable actually takes goes around door frames and along skirting rather than diagonally across a room, and a cable pulled taut across a doorway is one that gets replaced within a month.

If the run is the part putting you off, running Ethernet around a room neatly covers the routes and the fixings that make it invisible.

A powerline kit, when there is genuinely no route

For the case where the cable cannot go — through a solid wall, between floors with no riser, or across a rented flat where you may not fix anything to anything.

Powerline sends the signal through the mains wiring already in the walls. That is also its weakness: performance depends entirely on what that wiring looks like between the two sockets, whether they share a circuit, and what else is on it. A pair on the same ring main usually does well. A pair on opposite sides of a consumer unit sometimes barely works.

Plug both adapters into wall sockets rather than extension leads. A surge-protected strip filters exactly the frequencies the adapters use, which is a failure that looks like a faulty kit.

Which of these three approaches suits a given house is the whole subject of powerline vs mesh vs Ethernet.

A mesh node, and somewhere sensible to put it

For when the signal does not reach the room at all, rather than reaching it weakly.

The part people get wrong is placement. A mesh node on the floor behind a sofa, or sat next to the router it is supposed to extend, does very little — it needs to be roughly half way, high up, and out in the open. A wall mount is what makes that possible in a room with no convenient shelf, and it is the difference between a node that adds coverage and one that adds a second weak signal.

A PCIe Wi-Fi card, when the signal arrives and the PC still cannot hear it

This is the case that wastes the most money, because the symptom looks like a coverage problem and is not one.

A desktop is a metal box, usually on the floor, often under a desk against a wall. A phone standing in the same spot shows a strong signal while the PC struggles, and that difference is the antenna, not the network. A PCIe card puts external antennas on the back of the case where they can be angled and moved, which is a physically different situation from a small adapter inside the chassis.

Check your case has a free PCIe slot and that you are willing to open it. If you are not, a USB adapter on a short extension that lifts it off the floor solves a good part of the same problem.

The trade against the simpler option is set out in USB Wi-Fi adapter vs PCIe card.

A small switch, once one cable reaches the room

Last because it is not a distance problem at all. It is what you need immediately after solving one.

A single cable arrives at the desk, and then there is a PC, a console and a NAS wanting it. The instinct is a second run, or a second adapter. An eight-port unmanaged switch is neither: it takes the one drop and turns it into eight, needs no configuration, and sits behind the desk drawing almost nothing.

We looked at this one on its own in the TP-Link TL-SG108 review.

Before any of it, rule out the cable you already have

If there is already a cable and the connection is bad, none of the above is the answer yet. A cable that was fine for years can fail from a chair rolling over it or a door closing on it, and the symptom — intermittent drops, a link that negotiates at a tenth of its speed — reads exactly like a weak signal. Finding the bad Ethernet cable is the free version of this page, and it is worth half an hour before spending anything.