Tech advice for old house

susietsmith

Just moved into an old house which has never had broadband/wifi/any tech other than a tv aerial installed.  How do I go about getting tech set up?  I don't need a landline.  Thanks

flaneurs_lobster

Yours or are you renting?

Are you doing any renovations, specifically electrics?

Consider an ethernet network though the house at the same time.

MyRealNameToo

susietsmith said:

Just moved into an old house which has never had broadband/wifi/any tech other than a tv aerial installed.  How do I go about getting tech set up?  I don't need a landline.  Thanks

What "tech" do you want? 

Own or rent?

How big is the house?

What's the internal wall construction generally? 

At its most simple get a broadband setup with a decent router and see what the reception is like around the property. If it's not great in all the rooms then add repeaters or additional nodes (if using a mesh system). If you own the property and are doing major renovations then certainly putting in some cat network cabling would be good if only to connect the nodes physically and any high demand points like work station and lounge TV but in most properties wifi is adequate for 99% of users

ButterCheese

Most people have the router in the main or most central part of the house, like the lounge.  This can often send a good wifi signal to most other parts of the house.  If you have brick walls and/or a lot of corners to go around then this is where you start to struggle.

You can run an ethernet cable to areas of the house that can't get the wifi, but that can be invasive and hard to cover up.  Especially if you have solid walls.  But, you can then make an extra wifi network from a dedicated router for under £30.  i.e. you plug in the cable and it throws out a wifi signal.

Another option is powerline adapters (which use your electrical circuits, so you are essentially linking your wifi through your plug sockets) but this can provide mixed results depending on how the house has been wired.  And is somehting of a workaround rather than a main solution.

The other option is to have wifi boosters; a good option if you have a good trail of plug sockets from the strong wifi area to the weak areas.  But again, they work best in ideal situations which old houses are often not.

Finally there's a mesh system which I don't know much about, but places like Richer Sounds can install these for you and advise what is the best set-up for your house

Vitor

First step would be to check who can supply broadband services to the property and whether the location is still limited to ADSL on copper phoneline.

flaneurs_lobster

First step would be for OP to tell us if they own the property (or can get the owner to agree to) for any works to install a hardwire broadband solution.