Tired of tripping over the long, ugly blue Ethernet cable that I had strategically routed from my upstairs office, down the hallways, across the living room, to the port on the backside of our esteemed Roku, I resolved to arrive at a solution more befitting a family’s aesthetic and safety needs.
My trusty RSS reader delivered to me one day, a post by someone discussing options for this very scenario. He spelled out four or five solutions, the best of which, for my situation at least, was a product called a Powerline.
The 
Powerline is comprised of two Ethernet devices, each identical to one another. Setup is incredibly simple and the results are amazing. Plug one device into a wall socket near your modem, the other into a wall socket near the device you’d like to bestow with speed. In my case that is our beloved Roku, in yours it may be the Xbox or Wii, or even a laptop.
The final step is to remove that ridiculously long, unsafe Ethernet cable you’ve strung throughout the house and replace it with one about six feet long. Plug one end of the short Ethernet cable into your modem/router and the other end into the Powerline.
Magic will now happen.
Turn on your Roku, Wii, whatever, and revel in wonder. I guarantee you’ll ask yourself, ‘What was I thinking?’