WiFi is great. It's so easy and convenient. But it can be slow.
Years ago when it first came out you maybe had a PC and a couple of other devices at most. Nowadays you can have so many WiFi enabled gadgets you can struggle to identify them when you look at your router. WiFi devices outnumber people in our house at least 3 or 4 to one.
Nest thermostat, Dropcam's, PCs, Consoles, Phones, Tablets, Printer, Scanner, SLR etc...
Not only are you competing over channels with your neighbors (esp. if you have idiot ones who set their router wrong) but worse still, every device you add reduces the speed for all of them because the signal is divided up.
I run Tomato firmware on our router which helps give performance a boost but the room furthest from it never got a great signal and unfortunately, that was where our most avid gamer lived. I was trying to push him to use the XBox streaming option to his PC so we could watch programmes instead of Halo but it was too laggy even though it worked amazingly well from other machines (both PC and XBox using WiFi).
I'd looked at Powerline Adapters before but they didn't get great reviews and even the notional speeds weren't stellar, often 20Mb-ish. But it seems time has moved on and the latest models now offer connections upto Gigabit speed (theoretical).
For those who don't know what they are - they use the mains power cabling in your house to send a network signal. It's like getting the benefit of a hard-wired network but without the cabling ... the wires are already in your walls.
I got some ZyXEL adapters (PLA5456KIT) which come in a kit of 2 (because you need one at each end initially). I'd never heard of them before but they got tended to do better in reviews than the big name brands (e.g. Linksys). Each has a passthrough for the main as they should be plugged directly into the wall, not any extension strip that may filter out the signal. They also each have 2x gigabit ethernet ports so if you have a PC and a games console it works out great.
So do they work? Yes! Now the PC has the fastest connection in the house. I don't know if they are providing the full speed as promised yet but it's plenty fast enough and maxes out any broadband speed test (unless you are streaming video internally in your house, your connection to the outside will always be the bottleneck).
The only downside is when plugged into a double socket, the top one can no longer quite fit a plug that has a ground pin on it. The passthrough power plug saves this being a huge issue but it's worth knowing.
Overall I'd highly recommend them though. The other plus is that the devices you remove from the WiFi network mean better speeds for the ones that are left - phones, tablets and lesser used devices.
Now we just need Google to give us Gigabit internet ...