Although the powerline extenders worked fine, I eventually dumped these in favor of NetGear Orbi Mesh.

My NYC Mesh connection came into the back of my apartment, where I spend very little time. The wireless router plugs into a cable hung from the roof of the building and doesn’t use the cabling already in place and hooked up to Spectrum. This presents a problem getting signal to the front of my apartment.

Rather than run cables, I decided to try a powerline extender. These work by sending signals through the copper power lines. You need at least two, and one of them connects via Cat-5 to a router.

My main concern was that many things said that they had to be on the same “circuit”. I figured that might mean they have to come out of the same breaker from my main panel. A secondary but close concern was how noisy my copper is. Having worked with electronics in my nuclear physics days, I knew that some lines are be really noisy to the point of uselessness. Indeed, the advice online is to not have powerline extenders near things with motors, such as the compressors for air conditioners and refrigerators.

I settled on TP-Link’s AV2000 2-port Gigabit (Amazon.com) model for the very ungeeky reason is that 2000 is higher than the other device numbers and the slightly more geeky reason that it has a pass-through electrical socket.

I put one at the back of the apartment and one where Spectrum’s cable modem use to plug in. These are on different breakers from my I connected the back one the NYC Mesh router and plugged in another wireless hotspot to the front one (these are not wireless extenders).

Only a few devices were grumpy because they weren’t getting the right nameserver from their DHCP lease. The NYC Mesh router chose 192.168/16 as its private network while I had previously used 10.1/16. I wanted Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS server but some things were fixed on the old 10.1.0.1. Curiously, the CBS All Access app on Apple TV did not have a problem while Prime Video and YouTube did.

I added a pigtail (Amazon.com) between the wall and the device because the plug is too bulky. I think it was designed for the much larger European plugs and retrofitted with the small US plug. It’s big enough to block the second outlet:

So far so good, although the bad reviews on Amazon said they work fine for a couple of months then die. But, I also suspect those people were using them in the bathtub or something.