Do homeplugs increase speed relative to wireless? or strength of signal or is this the same thing?

Wi-fi can slow your broadband speed by up to 30% so yes, adding homeplugs should give you a faster, more robust connection.

Seconded.

 

Although – and here I'm playing the demonic avocado – they do put noise on the mains supply, which some of us go to great lengths to avoid.

You have now placed the image of a demonic avocado in my head and it won't go away. Claims direct here I come

Yep - although not seemingly applicable to the OP in this instance, mains plugs are best unplugged if you're planning some serious hi-fi listening, especially of the vinyl variety...

 

Do homeplugs work if you your router downstairs of one ring main and a pc upstairs on another ringmain?
Does the signal pass through the consumer unit to form a bridge between the two?

Also, when it comes to noise, homeplugs can also cause RF interference, that can interfere with DAB reception and degrade your Wi-Fi reception. 

Am I correct in thinking that homeplugs basically extend/create a wired network from the router without the need to lay down long ethernet cables? Can I still have a wifi network which I would need for iDevices. I use Airport express to create my wifi but i would be interested in having an AppleTV and my Mac on a wired connection but that currently isn't possible.

Would it go something like.

Router ---> Airport express to create wifi; and
Router ---->Homeplug and then 2nd homeplug in a different room connected to Apple TV etc

Would this work?

thanks
Chisy

Yes.

Allowing for my caveat on potential RF interference created by sending the signal down your unshielded home cabling.  Also, it depends a little on how your mains cabling is structured as to whether they (i.e. homeplugs) work well or not.  I'd recommend on buying them from somewhere with a cast iron policy of "Return no quibble if not fully satisfied" with product.

Yes. I have a homeplug connected to my router on one ring and two other homeplugs on different rings and it works fine. Also, I have a DAB radio sitting next to a homeplug and have not noticed any problems.

Thanks. I might look into them. Even if it is just to speed up the transfer if cd rips to my nas for the Sonos

Thanks, I suppose I ought to check that my wifi is 'significantly' slower compared to a wired connection.

But not always. In our case I had to put a cat5 link from the room where the router was to a different part of the house which was on another ring main to use homeplugs. All came out of the same consumer unit. Try it and see

 

I'd take that survey done by Epitiro with a pince of salt, and examine who commissioned the survey - I see no reason why wifi would slow down your broadband connection (providing ur average wifi throughput is fast enough to support ur max broadband speed), and also no reason why latency would noticeably increase, unless maybe everyone in ur road is using the same default channel.

 

Indeed, just testing on my own router - my broadband speed (wired) is 20.6Mb/s with a latency of 45ms to my favourite call of duty server, whilst wifi broadband speed is 20.8Mb/s and a latency of 48ms. So no difference.

 

As to homeplug/wifi - my Dlink Wifi-n Extreme gives a transfer rate of aroung 60Mbps, my Dlink 200Mbps Homeplugs give a transfer rate around 95Mbps. The wifi rate might be higher - but the wifi-n on my laptop is not mimo.

To get full speed between devices I use a gigabit switch connected to the homeplug. The homeplugs are just used to extend the network so the router can dish out dhcp addresses, devices connected to the switch can communicate to each other at full 1Gbps.

 

Citation please... I would be surprised if it was true and judging by the fact that someone 10 doors down from me asked politely to stop using homeplugs because it was ruining his ham radio hobby, I would be more inclined to think the exact opposite...