Or he lives in an apartment and running CAT6 isn't really an option.

He lives in a house.

I base this on two things.

(1) Apartments usually only have one floor. The article says he was having trouble with wifi between floors. That is not proof, but it is suggestive enough to warrant looking harder.

(2) He links to his Google+ stuff, and one of the things there is a photo of a house with Christmas decorations, which he describes as "Christmas lights near our house", and he links to Google maps for that lighted house. That house is in the middle of a vast sea of houses, with no apartments within a kilometer. All the apartment buildings with 6 km only offer units with one floor of living space (some do have a second floor, but it is a garage).

It's a pain in the ass no matter where you live. Making using existing wires that much more appealing.

Actually looked into this. While the family machine is directly downstairs from where the cable modem comes into the house, my computer is on the far other side. Cost to get Cat-6 run there was going to be expensive, and I have no desire to go up in my attic and work a couple hours in South Texas heat this time of year :-)

I just run stuff along the ceiling or baseboard. It's ugly, but I'm single so I'm allowed to do ugly things in my house. Here's my ethernet cable on the way from the living room to the cable modem which is on the opposite side of my house, joined by the speaker cable for the right rear surround channel [1].

[1] http://imgur.com/nBqo2n7

Google for "spiral cable wrap" Its a spiral cut "sleeve" that can be wrapped around multiple cables. Available in a couple colors, hopefully one matching your decor.

I have one along the wall in my living room, multiple surround sound speaker wires, cabled ethernet to the TV area switch, couple other wires. Back when composite video wasn't too out of date, I used to feed signals all over my house...

I just had my whole house wired up with Cat6. 2 runs each to 6 rooms + garage in the house.

$800, not including cost of materials. That's pretty cheap considering.

How did they wire it? Attic? Basement?