Review of dLAN 200AV USB Extender
This week, we had the opportunity to review the new Devolo dLAN 200 AV USB extender kit.
We first reviewed Devolo 200Av products back in March 2010 and were impressed with the reliability, speed and flexibility. As the 200AV range evolves, we are amazed that Devolo still manages to break new ground with its innovations in mains based wireless networking products.
The Devolo 200 AV USB extender kit is designed to solve a problem that many people are familiar with:- how to extend the physical range of USB devices such as printers, disk drives, web cams etc. Possible applications include:
- Printers in other rooms (remote and shared printing)
- External disk drives in remote locations (e.g. backup your data to another office)
- Hooking up a web cam from a remote location
Any USB device can be extended up to a maximum range of 300m by utilising Devolo’s mains connection kit. The possbilities of devices to connect remotely are limited only by imagination – We wondered if it would be possbile to hook up a mouse and keyboard to a PC sat in another room with the idea being we get to completely eliminate the constant fan noise of PC’s under desks. Sadly, the only thing that put the mockers on trying this out was that we couldn’t find monitor leads long enough!
Devolo DLAN 200 AV-USB Extender Kit
Contents (In The Box)
- 1 x dLAN® 200 AV USB adapter
- 1 x dLAN® 200 AVmini adapter
- 1 x Network cable
- CD containing software and documentation
- Hard copy of installation guide
Specifications
- Easy set-up of remote USB drives
- No more problems with thick walls: at last, wireless LAN in every room and on every floor of your house
- 200 Mbps (gross) connection for fast data transmission
Our View
We use the Devolo stuff a lot in the office. It’s cut costs in terms of not needing to muck around with building modifications to accommodate traditional network (RJ45) cables. As far as the USB extender goes, we’re still thinking about the best way of using the USB feature as a cost benefit. One obvious thing that springs to mind is moving various printers to more strategic locations this cutting down the “leg time” of staff.
Ease of Setup
There are 2 devices (or nodes as we have come to call them) in the starter pack:
- AV 200 adapter (we have lots of these already)
- The new USB adapter.
Adding AV 200 devices securely onto your network is as easy as plugging the devices into a spare mains socket and hitting the little “DLAN” button on each device to join it as a node and setup secure encryption.
We like the single click button setup for both DLAN and WLAN and are particularly pleased that the default configurations for both deliver a high degree of security. Good security by default means that even novice users can rest assured that their network wont be “hacked” or expolited by anyone else with wireless (or mains wired) network devices nearby.
Conclusion
We’ve already written about other Devolo 200 AV devices in previous reviews (see “related posts” below). Overall, we love these products for their simplicity and reliability. DLAN 200′s have saved us the hassle and cost of expensive office modifications that would have been needed with standard CAT5 networking cabling.
The new AV USB Extende kit plugged straight into our existing network in just a few minutes.
We have grown to love these products over the years. Sure, they are not the cheapest mains wiring solutions out there but they do deliver reliability, speed and ease of setup.
If you are looking to extend your network and perhaps add / extend wireless capability, you could do a lot worse than go for the Devolo AV 200 range.
Devolo 1409 dLAN 200 AV Wireless-N Starter Kit
- Data transfer rate (max): 200 Mbit/s
- Bandwidth: 2.4 GHz
- Connectivity technology: Wired
- Host interface: RJ-45
- Ethernet LAN connection: Y
Devolo DLAN 200 AV WIRELESS N STARTER KIT HOMEPLUG AV 1409 Networks Powerline Networking
List Price: £119.99
Price: £101.06
