MicroLink dLAN Highspeed Starter Kit review

Before the days of wireless networking the idea of a home network was a little bizarre. Who would go to all the hassle of trailing wires all over the house or, worse, threading them through wall cavities?

Wi-Fi took all the hassle out of networking and meant that for the first time home users could easily surf the Web from the sofa and share files and printers between a number of PCs. But there's a catch: if you have an old property with thick walls or a house with lots of metal mesh in the walls, then you'll often find it difficult to build a good wireless network.

If this sounds familiar, then you should try powerline networking - using the mains electricity network in your house to build a PC network.

We've seen powerline networking kits before, but they all had a maximum speed of only 14Mbit/s. And that was a theoretical maximum, in reality they tended to be even slower. This is nowhere near fast enough to reliably stream audio or video over a network.

Devolo's new high-speed powerline networking kit can move data around at a maximum of 85Mbit/s. This is still a theoretical maximum. The best transfer speed in our tests was 19.8Mbit/s. That's a long way off the quoted speed, but it's fast enough to stream video. The quality of your home's wiring and the number of sockets will affect its range and performance, though.

The kit is simple to set up. You just plug one adapter into each of your PCs and run the software supplied in the box. The data sent across the network is automatically encrypted with 56-bit DES encryption. This is a much lower standard of encryption than you get with Wi-Fi and there are no options to add extra layers of security. But because they would need physical access to your mains electric cables it's much more difficult for a snooper to break into this network.

Devolo's high-speed networking kit finally offers those who can't use Wi-Fi in their house a decent alternative way to build a home network, but it is rather expensive.