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My girlfriend lives in the same building as a couple of friends of hers. She lives in the 1st floor and the friends live in the 6th floor.

As she doesn't have a telephone line in her room and wants internet, I thought that maybe the friends can share their internet with her. WLAN will not work for that many floors. We cannot add a cable. The only solution I can think of is powerline. I haven't used that and I have only a very vague idea how it works. I guess that there are some elements which would guarantee it not to work; e.g. I have a hard time to imagine that it would work across different buildings.

Could powerline work over that many floors?

It's an older building in Germany; I would guess maybe 14 different apartments.

Martin Thoma
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  • Try it, they work by sendings signals over the mains wiring... just beware if others have them. – Solar Mike Apr 02 '20 at 11:51
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    Different floors may be on different phases, so there's possibly a 1 in 3 chance of it working. –  Apr 02 '20 at 11:54
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    Or stick a WiFi antenna out the window. – Dampmaskin Apr 02 '20 at 11:56
  • We use power line carriers on the same phase and the specification is 100 m in our application. I see commercial (EU) units specifies 300 m, but this will be for the same phase. You can always try, 33 % chance that it will work, 100 % if you include neighbours. – skvery Apr 02 '20 at 12:41

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As already written, the power grid usually consists of 3 phases. In Germany it is. But also typically there is every phase availabe in each apartment, mostly split into different rooms. There are so-called phase couplers which connect different phases at hf-side.

The problem is more the length of the line and the interference on top of it. And there are many of them: power supplies, photovoltaic systems, etc. You cannot make a statement like this, you should simply try it.

An alternative for you would be WiFi. You could install an antenna on the balcony. The signal should be sufficiently strong to receive over the free line of sight.

Findus
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