BT Wi-Fi Home Hotspot 500 Kit review

Conveniently, the Home Hotspot can provide a Guest connection that is intended to provide internet access to your friends and acquaintances without letting them see and other machines and devices on your network. Unfortunately, we found we were able to access other machines when connected to the Guest network.

Although we couldn’t find any mention of how to change the settings of the Home Hotspot in the included instructions, it is possible. You must download the BT Device Configuration Tool from BT’s website. This tool searches for the Hotspot on your network and then provides a link to the Hotspot’s web interface. You can then change the password and SSID for the Home Hotspot, create the Guest network and change the powerline password used by the two adaptors, among other options. The web interface is basic, but it’s well organised.

You’ll need to use this tool to find the Wi-Fi Home Hotspot 500 Powerline networking adaptor on your network

Some powerline adaptors are functionally brilliant, but aren’t best suited to use in the UK because of their shape and the orientation of their Ethernet ports. Such adaptors can be unusable if your plug sockets are located near thick skirting boards or work surfaces. Thankfully, that isn’t the case with the BT Wi-Fi Home Hotspot 500 kit. The plugs are located at the base of each adaptor and the body rises upwards, so you shouldn’t have any difficulty fitting the adaptors into a plug socket, and the Ethernet ports are conveniently located on top of each adaptor.

It’s just a shame the adaptors have Fast Ethernet ports rather than Gigabit Ethernet ports. The kit is rated at up to 500Mbit/s for data transfers, but the Fast Ethernet ports limit you to a maximum of around 93Mbit/s

The web interface is basic, but it’s well organised

The BT Wi-Fi Home Hotspot 500 Kit is a great buy if you simply want to add a fuss-free means of livening up a Wi-Fi deadzone. However, It could be worth paying more for the Devolo dLAN 500 AV Wireless+ if you need more than Wi-Fi enabled adaptor, as the Devolo kit includes three adaptors, two of which provide Wi-Fi access. The Devolo kit also makes it easier to change settings, especially the free smartphone and tablet apps for iOS and Android. The Devolo kit also provides similar Wi-Fi data transfer speed.

Even so, we think many people will be happy with the convenience and easy setup of the Wi-Fi Home Hotspot 500 Kit. Buy Now from Amazon