Devolo dLAN 200 Wireless N review

Devolo mains LAN and 802.11n wireless system gives home workers easy, secure connectivity

The Devolo dLAN 200 AV Wireless N system from German power line communications specialist Devolo allows remote workers to set up a LAN, an 802.11n wireless LAN (WLAN), and a small standard Ethernet LAN running over the mains electricity in their homes.

Power line communications systems work by adding a high frequency signal to the standard mains frequency used by mains electricity, which Devolo's devices can use to create a LAN.

It is a cheap and convenient way to add a network to each room in a home because you simply plug a device into the power socket in each room.

Anyone using an 802.11b/g wireless network at home should see a significant increase in performance, both in data throughput and in the range of the wireless connection, with the faster 802.11n standard, and the mains LAN gives an alternative network connection if wireless connectivity becomes unavailable.

We looked at a HomePlug Starter Kit costing £119.99 + VAT, which includes Devolo's dLAN 200 AV Wireless N and AVmini devices, an RJ45 LAN cable and the software required to manage the system.

Install

The dLAN 200 AV device plugs straight into a mains socket and offers three networks in one piece of hardware – LAN, WLAN and Ethernet LAN. Along with the AVmini device, this is all that is needed to set up the system in a typical home.

It’s easy to deploy. First link the AVmini to your broadband router using a RJ45 LAN cable. Then plug in the dLAN 200 AV Wireless N into the mains socket.

You can use a LAN cable to connect the dLAN 200 AV Wireless N device to your computer, or switch on the wireless on the dLAN 200 AV Wireless N device to give an 802.11n wireless signal.

Our Windows 7 Ultimate operating system determined what type of network to assign to the connection – from home, public or private. Firing up the browser brought an instant connection to the internet, after which we were prompted for a 16-character wireless encryption key to secure the wireless network.

The software CD included in the starter kit also has versions for Linux and Mac OS X operating systems.

Device management

By default Devolo’s HomePlug device uses DHCP to pick up an IP address from users’ broadband routers, although users can manually assign an IP address if required, and users can also input a 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) mains LAN security key to encrypt that network as well.

Both the dLAN 200 AV Wireless N and the AVmini have green LEDs which show users whether the power, LAN or mains LAN is on, and in the dLAN 200 AV device there is an indicator for when the wireless is on. The dLAN 200 AV device also has three buttons for toggling between the wireless network, the Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), and the mains LAN.

WPS is the standard created by the Wi-Fi Alliance so that non-network savvy users can more easily set up a secure home wireless network.

We installed the management and configuration software, Devolo Cockpit (version 1.0 – released July 2010), which gives options to check device status, device configuration, WLAN configuration and options for device management.

For example, users can set up different encryption schemes for different wireless standards, manage device firmware or simply check device connectivity over Ethernet LAN, wireless LAN and mains LAN networks. There is also a user-configurable time control system for enabling and disabling the WLAN for each weekday.
Data transfer rates

We recorded wireless data transfer rates between our test systems of between 6Mbit/s and 14Mbit/s over the wireless network. However, only one of our systems was 802.11n enabled, the others had slower 802.11g wireless systems. This means data transfer rates would drop back to the slower 802.11g wireless standard.

Users with end-to-end 802.11n connectivity should see much higher data throughputs because ours were limited by the slower network standard 802.11g, which although has a theoretical maximum of 54Mbit/s, would normally give only half that rate if systems were performing optimally.

The mains LAN data transfer rates came out at between 16Mbit/s and 55Mbit/s, depending on how far away the dLAN 200 AV device was from the AVmini that connected to the broadband router. Even in the most distant room in the house users should still see around 10Mbit/s.

Our home broadband connection gave us a maximum download rate of 12Mbit/s and we still saw that rate in all of the rooms we plugged the dLAN 200 AV into. But users with higher bandwidth connections, for example Virgin Media 50Mbit/s, will probably not see the maximum rates in all rooms in their houses if the transfer rate has a maximum of 10Mbit/s.

Conclusions

A neat, easy to set up system for home workers, which can be configured to work around many problems that can affect the operation of a wireless network in some homes. If the broadband router is password protected, the system allows a fully secured end-to-end network that is accessible from just about anywhere in the home.