1. Use wireless only as a convenience (working on laptop on your sofa).

2. Wire your house with cat-5e or cat-6 for true gigabit (note to Andy: cat-5e is capable of more than 100 Mbs) connections. As you noted. Ethernet over powerline is not reliable and much slower. Any skilled electrician should be able to do it for you at a very reasonable cost (actually, should be cheaper then connecting it via the powerlines).

3. Put all the servers down in the basement; your wife will love your for it. No or minimum noise, less heat, less flickering lights at night.

I’d rather not have the wireless router in my basement as most of my work is done up on the second floor. I specifically had the installer place the router upstairs for that reason; I wanted to minimize the signal degradation.

I’ve tested Ethernet over power-line here on the blog in the past and quite frankly, I wasn’t impressed. I don’t see that type of technology taking off without new approaches that offer major throughput improvement.

Still, there’s plenty of options here as you all pointed out, so I may re-think my approach yet!

You can follow my coverage of the WHS deployment I’m undertaking at the moment at http://www.guyontechnology.co.uk/tag/windows-home-server/

I thought I’d have a go too off the back of you trying it.

Also must say what a beautiful home you have Kevin.

As an added benefit Barb won’t have to have the wifi router on that little table in her office – looks kind of messy

I forgot to mention that you could put a switch down in the basement by the fios box and your router so you would have enough ports to use. Just seems like cat5 would have more use than coax for future projects.

The other way to do it would be to run cat 5 up that pipe and put a wifi access point in the attic running over power over ethernet. Then you wouldn’t have to try to get the wire to your office from the attic. You could also look at your cold air return vents for your furnace just use the plenum rated cat5 and that should work right?

To solve similar problem you are facing, i attached a switch to Verizon’s Router via cat5e. Then to the switch i connected a Linksys wireless access point with ‘N’ protocol. At the switch’s location, i have one server attached. Other servers are in other locations throughout the house, all connected via the ‘n’ protocol wireless.

As i sit here, i’m connected to my internal network at 130 Mbps via the wireless, which is fast enough for anything i need to do.

There are of course many variations on the above, including a fiber link between switches if desired.

Regards,
Jeff