Devolo dLAN 500 AVtriple+ Starter Kit

Ok, so it may be my fault for buying the wrong thing but the product description left a little gap in my knowledge. I was a techno phobe and worried about buying the wrong thing... then I bought the wrong thing. Part of the reason is that when I read diligently through the customer reviews for this exact product, there were a lot of rave reviews and great comments but with ambiguous language... so when somebody says "wow, this eradicates all my wireless blackspots" and similar, I thought, great, this is for me. I have a main PC, near the BT home hub and wired in with a LAN cable but I also run a laptop wirelessly around the house, iPad, iPhone, iPods. DSI's etc. Standard stuff for a 4 person family these days. At the point furthest from the BT home hub, the wireless signal drops into a black hole. I wanted something that would give me a good wireless coverage over the whole house, with a LAN connector for my sons desktop PC. The idea was that we'll plug this in his room, he gets the LAN connection and the rest of the house (upstairs) get the boosted wireless signal so we can use our wireless devices etc. I was totally confused and frustrated after 35 minutes of getting nothing and then checked develo.co.uk directly and looked up the tech support number. I called them and a very pleasant chap explained that this model was NOT a wireless signal booster too, it simply gave you extra LAN connections that needed to use a LAN cable to extra devices. I questioned him and explained my reasoning for buying it. He reckoned though that whilst people were accurate in their reviews, it was a little misleading. E.g. somebody saying it eradicates wireless blackspots was being correct in that wireless blackspots are no longer an issue because this product lets you plug in the devices in other rooms directly with a LAN cable... Hmmmm... Or, he suggested that they were meaning "used in conjunction with the dlan200 wireless booster" it has given them extra LAN connection points for cables and wireless boosting through the dlan 200 adapter. Hmmm... OK, so in summary if like me you are a techno phobe and not sure what you need, I would suggest that you call devolo directly and ask them. They are really helpful. I do want to have a single extra LAN connection point AND wireless boosting over the whole house to really eradiate blackspots (by boosting the wireless signal from my BT home hub) and the devolo chap has told me exactly what I need to buy; the dlan 200 "wireless" adapter.Footnote: he did confirm for the avoidance of doubt that if I bought the 200 wireless booster model and later decided that I needed more LAN cable connections in other rooms the devices were all compatible and I could add more and more on, as I needed whilst retaining and operating the original wireless booster.He also noted that if I waited until Nov/Dec 2012, devolo are bringing out the dlan 500 model which DOES have wireless booster incorporated... but that is not released in the UK yet and will be pretty pricey. That is what I hoped my original purchase would be but alas I was confused/misled by the product reviews and bought the wrong thing. The 500 is on its way back for a refund and I've ordered the 200 Wireless booster instead.

I bought this and a  DLAN 500 AVTRIPLE+ STARTERKIT  for our new home, so that I could push media to every room, without running cables everywhere. Wireless wasn't really an option, as I wanted to stream Blu-Ray rips in .mkv format ( at least 20Gb in size ), so this seemed to be an ideal solution.The kit itself was very simple to install and I would imagine for 'light' network usage it would be fine, however I ran into a few issues, which I haven't been able to resolve despite Devolo's tech support ( very quick to reply to queries, which is always a bonus these days ). The issues I ran into are:When I try to play Blu-Ray rips, I get a lot of buffering, which means the film is unwatchable. Devolo say the data throughput rates ( shown on thier Cockpit software ) are sufficient for smooth playback, but the problem remains, so I can only assume the adapters can't handle .mkv or very large files efficiently ?During the fault finding with Devolo, they mentioned that most double sockets act like an extension lead ( something that they don't recommend you plug the adapters in to ) and as most new build houses have double sockets it might cause issues.The other problem I have is that being a Mac user, there is no way to update the firmware of the adapters, as that's only available to Windows users, at this time. Luckily I was able to borrow a netbook, to do the updates, but if you can't it's something worth noting. Devolo are working on an application for Mac, but have no timeframe for when it will be available.

We have been using this product for more than a year now and we are very pleased with it.For me, you can't beat hard-wired ethernet cable and on my main computer at home, that's how I connect to the network. However, my wife has an iMac in the lounge and it would be hard work to run an ethernet cable there. She can connect via our WiFi router but even with the best router we could find, the WiFi signal drops out occasionally.The dLAN AVTriple+ Starter Kit solved the problem easily and provides not only a reliable connection to the iMac but we are using the two spare sockets to connect our Tivo box and WDTV media player to the network. Speed-wise, we are getting around 170Mbits/s which, to be honest is plenty good enough.I deducted 1 star because the AVTriple failed after 11 months :-(However, Amazon replaced the whole kit FOC (Thanks Amazon!)I also have a PC in the workshop (garage) which was just too far from the WiFi router. I have now added an extra AVplus unit here to solve that problem and despite it's more remote location, I am still getting 169Mbits/s.Very pleased.

I bought these to work with existing Devolo dLAN200 which I have used without problems for around 5 years. The new 500s report speeds of around 250Mbit/sec in the Cockpit software, whilst I was getting around 150MBit/sec with the 200 kit. Not sure how that relates to actual data speed (as some overhead is apparently required for transmission) but certainly provides a good link to my router in a room on the floor below at fibre broadband speed. They work well with the existing 200 kit and reported speed is up to 195Mbit/sec connected to the 200s so seems to improve their speed too. Having the 3 gigabit ethernet ports is great for attaching a NAS or other device (the wireless version has slower non-gigabit ports).Overall much faster and more reliable than wireless and no problems with dropped connections. I have found that they work best if you plug other things into the pass through socket, or else neighbouring sockets only via a short extension lead (eg. 4 way switched extension, 2.0m).Devolo kit is considered good quality but more expensive than competitors. There are few alternatives if you want 3 gigabit ethernet ports built in without using a separate network switch.