I just wonder if it is worth buying from Amazon a new power line adapter, trying it and if it doesn’t work send it back at no cost to you.
Perhaps try TP Link this time?
Very impressed with all the stuff you guys know.
I have ooooold basic comms so please don’t laugh at me 
.
All your solutions should work with some minor variations in the quality of kit. I think it’s right to be wary of investing in new kit due to risk of not working. - As what’s been tried already, has a feeling of being about right. I do like the idea of Amazon and return if it doesnt work though.
Has the actual strength of signal at the Livebox been tested? I think this is inadequate. Whether cable or air, (wifi/4G), it seems a poor signal problem not a cable capacity problem. Because of walls cable+booster seems the way. If the source signal is good enough to give something to boost, that is.
Also when building it I would add 1 pc then test, 1 printer then test, etc. And not 3 printers at once. Not till the end at least, and 1 by 1.
Wondering if it’s worth testing 4G alone as the core - you can resilie within 14 days without penalty if you buy remotely as I did - and seeing if that Livebox expense could be saved completely depending on your other usage.
Lastly if you’re stuck with the Livebox any chance of moving the kit next to it and seeing if that mskes any difference? FWIW I think you’ve got a cr4p signal incoming that is vulnerable to poor installation or you being at the far end of some long trunking or being affected by others’ usage.
Thanks, Karen
I don’t have a way to test the Livebox signal – it’s powerful enough for me to stream a 44min video from YouTube to my desk last night when I was fed up with all this tech stuff.
Its location is fixed because the “fibre modem” is hard wired through the wall to the building’s fibre “backbone” which Orange installed a few years ago – Caen was one of their pilots for the “fast fibre for every building” so all the buildings in the résidence park were wired.
The Livebox is our essential connection to the world. It provides internet, landline phone and TV.
I think am tempted to try a low-cost Powerline from Amazon such as the TPL TL-PA4010 for €34.93 [and sending back if it doesn’t work]. This can feed the 8-port to connect up the gear – and as previous contributors have said, would leave all the network admin at the Livebox.
Your tip about adding devices one at a time is very sensible. I learned this the hard way years ago when I was part of the team which migrated The Independent to Canary Wharf. I was supposed to be training the journalists [Mac + Word / Quark] but when the delivery of >350 Macs was delayed, the installation was “all hands”. We joked that we didn’t use trouble-shooting we used trouble-massacring!
Thanks again, Mat.
Amazon has a TPL TL-PA4010 for €34.93 which claims 600Mbps throughput. Presumably it’s cheap since it has only one Ethernet port. But that’s OK as I can use a patch cable to connect the 8-port switch.
Although it’s not super fast, we can compare download / streaming speeds via the Powerline with those we get with the wifi. But if we keep the wifi, the Powerline will mainly be concerned with file serving and backup.
In any case Most of the various backups are scheduled for the wee small hours when there isn’t any other network traffic – that really only matters with the 5GB image library disk which does update backups 6x a week and a full backup at 01h00 on Mondays.
As previous contributors have said, that would leave all the network admin at the Livebox – the Mac should connect automatically.
Thanks for all your help.
Ken
It may be worth you experimenting switching between 2.4GHz and 5GHz wifi.
Normally 5GHz would be the preferred option, however using the 2.4GHz band will have less trouble passing through walls etc.
Please let us know how you get on.
(the other option could be a mesh WiFi network but it would be a lot more expensive).
Power line adapters can be great if your house’s outlets are wired in a ring main U.K. style.
If not, you’d have to find out if the source and target outlets are fed from the same point.
What !! So, you just have a fibre cable coming out of a wall, where the main riser is ?. Don’t you have a fibre socket on the wall?. If you don’t, then Orange have done a bad job for you. If you had a socket, then you could have purchased a longer fibre ‘cable’ and threaded this through the wall and moved your Livebox.
1 Like
In my hands on experience that are definitely inferior to Devolo units Mat.
I haven’t heard of these. Whatever achieves the result @Ken_Welsby is after without costing a fortune is good with me.
Powerline data transmission is Devolo’s core business, they are not cheap but they work superbly.
They even make these cheeky chappies for your power board.
https://www.devolo.global/magic-2-lan-dinrail
Which I will use if and when fibre ever makes it down the road and in to my garage.
Our fibre connection to/from the modem is hardwired through the base of the old phone socket, behind which is a “sleeve” – I think the term is grommet – lining a small hole in the wall.
This was part of the original France Telecom phone setup, which was standard in every apartment, I think when the property was built in the 70s. The Orange guy who installed our fibre explained in bad techie franglais that using this meant they did not have to drill through more than 200cm of loadbearing concrete wall.
I don’t know whether this was an official Orange technique for fibre installs or whether it was just something developed locally. Bear in mind that the fibre backbone was installed at least 6 years ago at an early stage in the rollout. [The Orange Fibre info sign was already fixed in the lobby when we moved here, so don’t know an exact wiring date.]
I’ve heard good reports on the Devolo Lan-din rail system; I think that’s what a colleague in Paris has just had installed as part of the re-wiring of her house. She’s a director of a TV / film production company and spends almost her entire day online, either in her home office or “minema” – basically an adjoining little room with a giant TV screen, an electronics rack and some comfy chairs. One of her two fibre services iinks to the powerline, the other is hardwired into the two workrooms.
Ideally the CPL units have to be on same phase, not necessarily the same circuit. If you have a triphasé situation you can still run them but you need a special “coupleur de phases” to spread the digital stuff onto the other phase, if you can’t achieve that by an alteration at your tableau.
https://www.amazon.fr/Allnet-ALL1688PC-Coupleur-triphasée-Allemagne/dp/B00606NQZY
1 Like
Take this suggestion with a very large sack of salt…
If you now have fibre arriving in the house/flat - do you have an old redundant internal phone system of sockets in other rooms? If so could you use this to run network signal to other rooms by putting an RJ45 connector on the end of the cables?
There you go - possibly a daft suggestion but may be an off the radar solution.
Only if the wiring is Cat5e or better. Standard French internal 'phone wiring isn’t up to spec, & some isn’t even twisted pairs.
1 Like
This sounds to me to be a very bad excuse for a botched job. Is the old telephone socket still in use ? If not, then they could have just replaced that with an optical socket. Even if it’s still in use, it’s not rocket science to mount another socket on the wall using the same hole for the fibre.
Anyway, what’s done is done. I think people have already mentioned every other option I can think of, with the possible exception of the use of RFC1149 
I think the whole idea was to provide a simple, quick and clean installation for residents’ benefit as well as Orange. No drilling, no mess – in and out of each apartment in minutes. It’s quite clean and tidy – and of course saves Orange a couple of euros each time.
Given that more than half the homes in Caen are apartment buildings of reinforced concrete / block construction – our legacy of 1944 – I think the planners and engineers did well to create one of France’s first all-fibre cities. Just a shame that some rural side roads are still waiting. [The “agglomeration” of Caen la Mer consists of the city, the port town of Ouistreham and more than 30 individual villages from coast to countryside.]
Bear in mind many of the residents here are elderly folk who are not necessarily heavy tech users. But since the phone network was moving to fibre everyone with a landline had to have it.
As one of my chums who was involved in the local authority’s fibre planning team told me: “A big résidence like yours with service ducts and risers is easy – one trench 50m down the road and hello to 300 homes. Walk round the corner and see how many houses you pass with a 50m trench – three if you’re lucky.”
Dear all – quick update
The TP-Link Powerline 1000 is working fine All the kit in the study is Cat 6 wired from the Powerline via the Netgear GS switch.
Everything fired up first time and now:. Netflix and YouTube on my Mac are faster than before, we can both see the server and each other’s Macs and all three printers.
All I’ve got to do now is tweak the betwork backups and then finish connecting my desktop audio amp [for Apple [quote=“Ken_Welsby, post:1, topic:37958, full:true”]
Dear all
Can someone double check my thinking as I try to sort out network probs. Sorry this is long – I’m mindful of the recent advice to provide accurate info on tech probs!
I’m trying to put together a mini network in the study, where we have:
- 2 user iMacs [self and Mrs W]
- 1 older i Mac which is supposed to act as fileserver / backup etc
- Win laptop used occasionally
- 3 printers [duplex laser, large format colour inkjet, desktop inkjet for standby]
For internet access we have wifi from the Orange Livebox [Livebox 4], which is hard wired in the living room – the other side of three walls. Moving it isn’t an option because the fibre optic “trunk” is in the building’s rising main on the other side of the wall.
The wifi also links to users to the fileserver – but it is slow, especially with Photoshop files which are often c 100 MB.
All the printers have Ethernet capability but are currently used with USB, which is sluggish to say the least [ particularly long docs or A3 images].
So what I want to do is connect all the kit in the study with a wired Ethernet, and just use the wifi from the two user Macs for internet access.
A while back a well-meaning techie advised us to buy a range extender. Netgear Nighthawk EX7000, which has 4 Ethernet ports as well as the dual band wifi. Great! we thought. Connect the computers by wifi and plug the printers into the ports.
Sadly, it doesn’t work. Specifically it does not sustain the wifi connection with the Livebox on either the 2.4 or 5GHz bands. It will connect for say, half a minute and then fail. Same with or without WPS, with or without factory reset and all the other “fixes” suggested by Netgear etc.
Wifi to / from my Mac is usually OK unless and until I’m downloading HD video, when it sometimes stumbles. But speeds are very patchy, considering it’s supposed to be an 802ac connection to Orange’s fastest fibre [I think that’s somewhere about 100M].
The building is 1970s concrete – the walls are more than 300mm thick, and full of re-bar, so we suspect that’s the reason.
Macs can happily switch from wifi to wired networks with one mouse click. So working assumption is to separate internet and local services on wire-less and -ed. So I think I need:
A basic Ethernet router to will handle the IP, DHCP and other gubbins – all suggestions grat rec –
That will connect the server and my legacy 8 port Netgear switch [GS-108]
Cat 6 cables from each device to the switch – numerous legacy items from 2m to 10m, all top quality.
What if anything else do I need to do / know?
Apologies for the length, and TIA for anyone who can give me even 30sec info / advice.
Ken
Can someone double check my thinking as I try to sort out network probs. Sorry this is long – I’m mindful of the recent advice to provide accurate info on tech probs!
I’m trying to put together a mini network in the study, where we have:
- 2 user iMacs [self and Mrs W]
- 1 older i Mac which is supposed to act as fileserver / backup etc
- Win laptop used occasionally
- 3 printers [duplex laser, large format colour inkjet, desktop inkjet for standby]
For internet access we have wifi from the Orange Livebox [Livebox 4], which is hard wired in the living room – the other side of three walls. Moving it isn’t an option because the fibre optic “trunk” is in the building’s rising main on the other side of the wall.
The wifi also links to users to the fileserver – but it is slow, especially with Photoshop files which are often c 100 MB.
All the printers have Ethernet capability but are currently used with USB, which is sluggish to say the least [ particularly long docs or A3 images].
So what I want to do is connect all the kit in the study with a wired Ethernet, and just use the wifi from the two user Macs for internet access.
A while back a well-meaning techie advised us to buy a range extender. Netgear Nighthawk EX7000, which has 4 Ethernet ports as well as the dual band wifi. Great! we thought. Connect the computers by wifi and plug the printers into the ports.
Sadly, it doesn’t work. Specifically it does not sustain the wifi connection with the Livebox on either the 2.4 or 5GHz bands. It will connect for say, half a minute and then fail. Same with or without WPS, with or without factory reset and all the other “fixes” suggested by Netgear etc.
Wifi to / from my Mac is usually OK unless and until I’m downloading HD video, when it sometimes stumbles. But speeds are very patchy, considering it’s supposed to be an 802ac connection to Orange’s fastest fibre [I think that’s somewhere about 100M].
The building is 1970s concrete – the walls are more than 300mm thick, and full of re-bar, so we suspect that’s the reason.
Macs can happily switch from wifi to wired networks with one mouse click. So working assumption is to separate internet and local services on wire-less and -ed. So I think I need:
A basic Ethernet router to will handle the IP, DHCP and other gubbins – all suggestions grat rec –
That will connect the server and my legacy 8 port Netgear switch [GS-108]
Cat 6 cables from each device to the switch – numerous legacy items from 2m to 10m, all top quality.
What if anything else do I need to do / know?
Apologies for the length, and TIA for anyone who can give me even 30sec info / advice.
Ken
[/quote]
Dear all
Just a quick update – and a big thank you for all the advice and help.
The TP Link Powerline 1000 works fine. It links to the Netgear switch to which all the devices here in the study are Cat 6 wired. So… Netfix and YouTube on my Mac are faster than ever - even full-screen 2160 on the Retina Display – we can both see the server and all three printers.
All that remains is to update the configs for the network backup, and wait for a new speaker cable for my local audio setup [CD or Apple Music via a budget Behringer DAC to my old Technics amp. It mainly feeds my cans, but there are some works which just sound so much better with the spatial audio that only speakers deliver.]
So thanks again.
Ken
Oh, quick info for lovers of Amazon delivery trivia:
Speaker cable ordered yesterday afternoon from the regular French site. German brand product, marked “EU manufacture”.
Last night the panier showed “Livraison Mardi” which is what I expected. But what I did not expect when I did a “Suivi…” this morning: the package was in Madrid. That’s a new one for me!
2 Likes
Hi Ken, glad you’ve made some progress.
Having had a quick read through this thread, I thought it might help to mention the use of a mesh wi-fi network. This is another relatively new technology that uses several wi-fi bases to work together and provide wi-fi throughout a building. It can often be used to solve the sort of challenges that your home presents.
I’ve used the TP-Link Deco system to solve similar problems for clients before now, to very good effect. So, perhaps something for you to bear in mind in the future.