Devolo dLAN 550 WiFi Powerline Starter Kit

Devolo has updated its old dLAN 500 WiFi Powerline adaptor kit with the dLAN 550 WiFi Starter Kit. It offers faster Wi‑Fi and better wireless range.

Powerline is a neat technology that uses the power cables in your home to create a home network, as if you had ethernet cables snaked through your house. This means you can enjoy much faster download times in your living room, for example, compared to using a ropy Wi‑Fi connection that’s shared by everyone else in the house.

Powerline adaptors are simple to set up. Plug one into a power socket near your router, then connect the adaptor to your router with an ethernet cable. Next, plug a second adaptor into another room’s wall socket and connect that to the device you wish to have fast internet access, such as your television.

In the box

While Powerline itself is simple to set up, working out the names of each adaptor can be confusing. The dLAN 550 WiFi Starter Kit consists of two different adaptors.

The base adaptor that you plug into a wall socket near your internet router is a dLAN 550 duo+. This has two ethernet ports (10/100 ethernet, not the faster gigabit ethernet ports you get on the top‑of‑the‑range dLAN 1200+ Powerline) and a passthrough socket. The latter saves you losing a wall socket, and even improves Powerline speeds by minimising electrical ‘noise’ on the line.

The second adaptor that goes in the other room is the actual, improved dLAN 550 WiFi, which adds the extra Wi‑Fi hotspot.

But this second‑room wireless adaptor has just the one ethernet port. This puzzles us, as we’d have thought that having more than one ethernet port in the second room would be more useful than another by the router, which may well have multiple unfilled ports itself.

It does mean that the second adaptor is very compact, so won’t ruin the look of your home.

Features

Powerline don’t come bristling with features. They usually do one thing