WiFi extenders - any recommendations?

I’ve built a garden office/gym out the back to make working at home less of actually in the house and get some sense of home back - so obviously a garden office makes sense for me.

But I want to get the internet and I’m torn.

The Internet comes through the front of the house. And I don’t want to drill behind walls to run a CAT5 behind the walls - certainly don’t want wires going along the walls.


Option 1 - a wifi extender
Something like this

Option 2 - Powerline Adapter Wi-Fi Kit
Like this


Anything else anyone can think of?

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I briefly owned and used a TP-LINK RE450 (It was actually an earlier model, an RE355) and I wasn’t impressed. I felt like it may have helped some but not as much as I had hoped. Perhaps the newer model does a better job. At the time I was in a house that was about 1800 sq. ft (about 170 sq. meters) and my router was in the front of the house and I had trouble getting decent internet in the back right side of the house through several walls. However, I also had pretty crappy internet, so that may have also been a contributing factor. Trying to extend crappy internet could just result in crappier internet. Ha. My speeds were around 15-25 Mbps without the extender, and I vaguely remember with the extender while in the front of the house where I was getting “full” internet … with the extender in the back of the house I was lucky to be getting around half that.

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Thanks the update. I’m hearing good thing about the electric plug wifi. Might do that. Good I plug one end directly to internet. Then hopefully plug other end in garden office

When it comes to networking, I am utterly hopeless, but I have a friend who loves doing that sort of thing. He installed two wireless routers in my house. More or less one on each end of the house. They have different names, but logging into one is the same as logging into the other. And you’ll get passed off from router to router as you move throughout the house. That’s my understanding of the situation anyway. They are Asus routers. I am quite happy with the way the setup works. I could get the exact model number of the routers if that’s something you’d be interested in.

Yeh that would be helpful, thanks

Asus AC 1900 Dual Band 802.11ac Gigabit Router

Again, I don’t know the specifics of how it works going back and forth between the two routers, but I can tell you it works well.

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Thanks I’ll look into that. I’m not too bad on the tech side so should be able to figure it out.

You should also keep the material of your home in mind. Even with an extender my old home’s wifi was terrible at going through brick and upstairs.

My vote is always for adding CAT5. My husband agrees that if you have a basement or crawl space to feed it through, you’re going to be better off.
If you feel adventurous, look into a MOCA:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/worldwidesupply.net/blog/moca-adapters-beginners-guide/amp/

Something else to consider (for everyone) is to ask your internet service to send someone out to check on your poor internet connection.
We had a service tech come out for that. He checked the connection from within the house and to the router. He ended up replacing a few coax cables because they were old but our connection was still not as good as he wanted. He they went out to the street and did repairs on the pole. Now we have excellent internet!!

Interesting

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