Product Reviews

Most of us have become accustomed to surfing the Internet, emailing, or downloading music from iTunes without being tethered to a desk or wired to an Internet connection. And for those of us whose choice of working location makes wifi impractical - either because the access point is too far away or there are too many thick walls between the sofa and the base station - Homeplug is a reasonable solution.

The problem with Homeplug is that you're tethered to a power point and so sitting in the garden on one of the few sunny days we've has this summer means leaving your laptop behind. The Devolo Dlan Wireless Extender Kit aims to change that. It's a two-piece solution consisting of a regular Homeplug adaptor and a Homeplug adaptor with support for 802.11b and 802.11g wireless networking. The idea is that you plug the regular adaptor into a power socket next to your access point or wireless router and connect the two using an Ethernet cable. You can then plug the wireless adaptor into any power socket on the circuit and connect to it wirelessly from your laptop. The result is that your home mains circuit becomes a network to which you can connect from anywhere within 802.11g range of a power socket.

So, for example, if you have trouble getting a wireless signal at the far end of the garden

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and have a power outlet in the garage, you could use Homeplug to connect the garage to your network using the mains circuit and then wirelessly connect to the adaptor in the garage.

The Kit can also be used the other way round - the wireless adaptor bridges to your wireless access point and the power circuit to which it is connected then becomes part of your wireless network.

Maximum theoretical transmission data rates are 85Mbps for the mains supply part of the network and 54Mbps for the wireless connection. However, as with all network data rates, sustained real world throughput is much less. That doesn't matter however unless you spend much of your day shunting large files around your network. It's more than adequate for web surfing, emailing and downloading.

The Kit supports DESpro encryption over the mains circuit and Wep, WPA and WPA 2 over the wireless connection. Maximum theoretical range is 200m for the mains supply and 300m via Wlan. Again, real world range will be significantly less.

The Kit is very easy to set up, requiring nothing more than plugging the adaptors into power sockets - directly if possible, Homeplug doesn't like power strips as a rule - and plugging the wired adaptor into your access point or router. Then it's just a case of running the configuration software on the accompanying CD.

In use we found that it worked exactly as expected. Weak signals became full-strength when using the Kit and areas where we were unable to wirelessly connect at all were now inhabitable by an Airport-capable laptop.

At the time of writing the Wireless Extender Kit is available on Amazon for £115 whereas the regular high-speed starter kit, without any wireless support, costs £85. To us that's a small premium for the additional flexibility that the wireless extender offers and makes the Wireless Extender Kit a very good buy.