Can I split ethernet off the fibre modem?

[dseanf]

We currently have the Telus 150 fibre optic plan. Fibre comes in through the basement to an Alcatel-Lucent box. There is only one port active on that box (my understanding is that a second port would require a second fibre line) and it goes to the WiFi modem, which is currently on the main floor.

Our house is two floors plus basement. Next month my wife and I will both be teaching online, and twice each week we're teaching at the same time (Zoom meetings, mostly). Occasionally there are reliability issues with the WiFi. (This might be as much the fault of my computer as anything else -- Dell XPS with Killer WiFi. I'll have 160 mbps down one minute, and no connection the next. If I'm teaching a class I obviously can't have these intermittent 30 second breaks from the internet!)

For more reliable connections I'd rather run ethernet. The house isn't pre-wired for it though.

In the spring my wife and I taught at alternating times, so we moved the WiFi modem down to the basement and ran ethernet into the basement office.

I could still do that, of course, but my wife will be teaching on the second floor, and being two floors up is not going to leave her with a good signal.

One thought: put an ethernet switch right off the fibre box, and keep the WiFi modem upstairs. But I suspect that the WiFi modem is needed to resolve the signal coming from the fibre box. Would I need a second modem to do this?

Just spent 2 hours on the phone with Telus and the only suggestion I got was upgrading from the 150 plan to 300. That still doesn't give me a wired connection in the basement.

Any options I'm missing that don't involve running 200 feet of ethernet cable down the stairs? WiFi boost maybe? Thanks!

[xray]

That's because the only reason they have the MoCA adapters are for installing the Optik boxes.

[giantbrownguy]

Are you not able to pull a new ethernet cable along the path of the current one from the fibre box to the modem? 

Honestly, your best bet for a low cost wifi coverage option is to get the Telus Boost 2-pack. I have two of those running in my house and they do the job well. Both are powered by ethernet but only one actually has to be hooked up to the T3200. The other can operate by wifi. 

[dseanf]

This was more or less the resolution.

Telus sent a tech (took me a couple of attempts to talk them into it...)

He gave us a Boost set.

Pulling new cable wasn't really an option: there's a whole mess of cables (COAX, phone, etc.) in the utility room. None of it is labelled, so I don't know what goes where.

With the tech I was able to sort things out pretty well:

1. Move the modem to the basement

2. Activate an RJ-45 jack in the adjacent office

3. Connect the modem through a phone line to a main floor jack, and put the first Boost node there.

4. Put the second Boost node on the second floor.

So wired connection in the basement, and wifi on the other two floors. Should be good enough.