From a long time I had tried different things at home to improve my wifi network range between my first floor and ground floor at home. The thing is that my ground floor portion has atleast six pillars making mobile and internet signal penetration almost impossible. So I cannot take calls, or browse the net sitting in my family room in the ground floor.
As though that was not enough my super fast ACT broadband connection was provided in first floor which necessiated me to have some way of propogating the signal back to ground floor. I tried my ever faithful netgear wn3000 RP wireless range extender. but from about 25mbps all I got at ground floor due to using this was about 5mbps. Frankly its nothing to do with the extender itself as many people would mistake it, its to do with the way my house has been constructed.
Most people discount this fact and start complaining on the wireless devices. Most of the wireless signal part is also about how it has to traverse through your home. So this having failed my next best, baddest and biggest bet in the recent decade worth of time was to go in for a power line wireless extender. The concept of this technology is very simple. The signal from router is fed via an ethernet line to a powerline adapter plugged into a power socket DIRECTLY into the wall.
From there an additional powerline adapter is plugged at another location in the house along same power line. So now data is transferred from the ethernet lines of your router onto power lines in your house to reach the second powerline adapter. From there on it is converted again into wireless signals and transmitted as WiFi at the second location. This obviously has a stronger signal than any run of the mill type extenders. Further there would also obviously exist a confusion of how that second wifi connection would be named and whether devices in your house always have to latch onto different wifi devices at different levels or rooms in your house. The simple answer is YES and NO. Yes you could have it that way, and NO it need not be that way as you could just clone your existing wifi connection with a single button press on the powerline extender and its the same SSID (network name) whereever you are at home.
Note though that you would need to just switch your WiFi off and on once at least when you move locations within your home in order to catch the stronger signal of the two places though network name is same.
Now was the harder part – how to order it from USA since either Americans believe we dont need better technologies, or Indians love to live with older technology and outdated gadgets being sold here. In a market where mobiles and PCs rule the roost, powerline adapter is the last thing anyone would want in India seems like.
I had two options here. One is to ship it within USA and pay tax and ask someone to bring it home, and the other is to ship it directly to India thanks to Amazon’s new shipping possibilities. Of course on one side this meant state tax and on the other side this meant customs duties. I found that the customs duties were lower than state tax prompting me to opt for the latter mode.
And sure enough as stated, I got the package to my home without a fuss on or before the stated date. What you must remember to consider is to ensure that the adapter is capable of taking a 220V power supply inspite of having rectangular pins. Please please always look at this carefully to avoid buying the wrong product or having to blow up the product you just bought by giving it a wrong power input.
