You can easily run a few dozen meters of cat5e while still having a better signal, latency and throughout than wifi or powerline will at equivalent distances.
In a pinch, I once ran an in-door Ethernet cable along the building exterior to connect multiple floors together. The cable held on for over 3 years until I left. Total length was about 70m.
A longer time ago, I did the same, with a cable going from my window, over the roof, to my sister’s window. Granted, this was in a time where 54Mbit/s was the pinacle of wifi performance.
I'm kind of thinking of doing the outdoor side of the house run myself. All my network equipment is in the basement and the second floor would involve difficult drilling and cutting holes in drywall to get access to drill. I don't really like the idea of drilling holes in the exterior walls of my house all that much though.
One tip I read while researching this is to make sure the low point where the cable enters the house has a loop or other feature such that the cable's lowest point isn't also the entry point of the house. This way condensation and water will drip off the cable instead being fed right into your wall.
Now that I have disposable income, and a fair amount of common sense, I would probably ask an electrician-friend to help me out on a project like this.
Although, Crosstalk Solutions has some very nice comprehensive videos on how they wired up some houses up at a lake[1], and it doesn't feel _that_ difficult, although there's probably a lot of know-how and gotchas they don't mention in the videos.
In the realm of things that shouldn't have worked, I remember my brother in the early-mid 90s strung a telephone-grade wire around a house to directly connect two computers via their serial ports for serial-line IP (SLIP).
His best result was using one pair to connect send/receive lines like a null-modem. With XOFF/XON inband flow control and no grounding, he increased the serial port rates beyond what the modems of the day would achieve, and it worked. Our guess was that above a certain rate, it acted more like an AC transmission line and less like ground-referenced levels.
In a pinch, I once ran an in-door Ethernet cable along the building exterior to connect multiple floors together. The cable held on for over 3 years until I left. Total length was about 70m.
A longer time ago, I did the same, with a cable going from my window, over the roof, to my sister’s window. Granted, this was in a time where 54Mbit/s was the pinacle of wifi performance.