devolo Magic 2–2400 Wi-Fi 5 Next: Whole Home Kit | 4k/ 8k UHD Streaming | Stable Home Working (Up to 2400 Mbps Powerline, Mesh WiFi 5, G.hn, 5x Gb LAN ports)

I had been using TP Link devices, to get cable bandwidth over my mains sockets at the other end of my house to where the router is located. However, I started to get low signal strength and disconnecting, which rendered them useless. Having done some research, I decided to take the plunge, and try these powerline devices. Initial setup failed completely, so I decided to follow the manual process for pairing the devices, which worked perfectly. I did notice you must have them not all on the same circuit, especially if there are lots of other mains devices connected, as it will cause a weak signal warning over the cables. I placed the 2 Wi-Fi/LAN devices in the same sockets where my TP-Link devices were, and they both connected to the device at the router end perfectly. To configure the Wi-Fi on them, I strongly recommend you download the app 'Devolo Cockpit' onto your mobile first. It will automatically detect the Wi-Fi and allow you to configure and make changes to SSID and password, so you will not need the key from the back of the devices. It is a brilliant app, and easy to use, but sometimes you need to keep re-connecting until it recognises the devices, so be patient. I get nearly 100MB on Wi-Fi, and full bandwidth of 200MB over the cables. Expensive, but well worth the money, as you are paying for superior performance and signal quality.

Ok, first some history, i live in a 16th century old building, it has thick walls and is L shaped and i have an office that is 50m away, i have a 40MBs download speed from my provider. I have tried every thing, Powerline adaptors, wireless extenders, Netgear orbi units, ubiquity mesh finally settling on 6 tenda mesh units for the past year. I have had all sorts of issues, low speeds some days ok somedays useless, mostly useless, at best 8-10 Mbs my office was mostly unuseable, yhe best i could ever get was a wired connection to my router then 36 mbs but around the house really rubbish, i could not run cables due to the layout, anyway after reading a review of these i gave it a go. Well setting up was not straightforward, ignore the app and do it manually worked first time. So plugged the lan near my router in tthe middle of the house, arggh its rubbish, up and down speeds and random dropouts, the office was 2mbps, its going back. Then i moved the lan and router close to my distribution board on the first socket of the ring main and wowser.... i have wireless everywhere, not only near the router but all over, i have 1 wireless in the lounge and 1 in my office, i have 37mbs everywhere, even in my office , my cameras work brilliantly ( they never have before), i keep testing as i cant beleive it, but as of today its been perfect, no dropouts, no glitching when streaming, So with selective positioning of the lan unit it can be the magic answer, im not sure why moving it close to the dis board worked but it did,so pair the units manually then if your router is not in the ideal position, run a temporary lan cable and try the lan unit in different sockets to get the best, ignore the mobile app and run the devolo cockpit app to get the speeds between units, also make sure you use at least cat5E cable from the router to the lan unit. Also you can clone your existing wifi so you dont have differing ssid, just 1 seemless network.Well done Delovo

Easy to install and configure. Signal seems to be good and reliable. One concern- the units do run a bit on the warm side so may need to turn off in the summer to avoid the additional heating they provide.

I’ve had them all, or most of them: the blue plugs, the 50s, the 200s, the 500s and the 1200s. It’s been four years since I upgraded. I had some time on my times so I upgraded. The installation was a doddle, sync the endpoints before powering up the adaptor connected to the router. It was fired up inside ten minutes. Hah. I could see the reported speeds were much better. The improvement to wireless speeds was negligible. Still, they worked and I was good until WiFi 6 was prevalent. Three mornings later my wife said, “Alexa has stopped working”. Our Echos were all off-line. So were our Kasa and Amazon smart plugs. How odd. Reboot the adaptors and everything worked again. For ten minutes. Stupidly, I initially treated this as an endpoint problem. I reinstalled the plugs and the Echos, knowing full well that this would mean reviewing all the Alexa routines. Reinstalling the devices was a complete PITA - they would not latch onto wireless. Very odd. The Facebook Portal+ was fine. The PCs were ok - although speed test reported wild variances in throughput. Still, managed to reinstall the devices. Rebooted the adaptors - and all the devices fell off the network again. Randomly changed adaptor settings based upon some guy on the interwubz chat rooms. MIMO to SISO? Nope. VDSL to Full Power? Nope. The Magics had survived three days. So I reset them back to factory and reinstalled them. Everything connected...for ten minutes. Pulled the old 1200+ devices out, put them in - and everything works. The Magic is back in its box on its way back to Amazon. Could I have contacted technical support? Probably. But for the hassle of troubleshooting and talking to engineers to make the system reliable for almost no noticeable improvement didn’t seem like a good bet. I thought I knew Devolo. I was wrong.

My Virgin Media hub 3 router is in the upstairs study in the corner of my house. My Hi Fi system is diagonally opposite in the downstairs corner of the house. As I didn't want to 'hardwire' from router to music streamer using ethernet cable I decided to try an over the mains system. I am pleased to say this works very well, and to my ears the sound of the music coming through on 'Tidal' is very good. There is no signal break up so far. Wifi on phones and tablet was weak or non existent when away from the router. (The hub 3 is not that good anyhow). I looked into wifi mesh systems and wifi extenders but decided on the Devolo system because; a) this can be set up as a mesh system; same SSID, password as the hub 3 so don't need to change when moving around the house, b) over mains data transmission which works well for my Hi Fi, c) don't loose the use of an electrical socket, although Devolo do state that you shouldn't plug the unit into a mains extension cable. (The mains extension cable can however run out through the Devolo socket). Also on this point, if you put the Devolo plug into a double wall socket shared with some other appliance, this has the same effect as using an extension lead. They say it can effect the wifi signal. d) Fairly easy to set up. Main downside: expensive. Wifi speeds around the house vary from day to day, hour to hour. I am on the VM 300 mbps supply, and sometimes I get that around the house but more often than not I get between 120 to 250 mbps. I think the fluctuation is more to do with Virgin Media than the Devolo sockets. Also the two wifi plugs are hidden. One behind the television in one room and the other in a corner behind my hi fi gear in another room. One other thing, I live in an oldish house and mains electrical system for the power sockets is a single circuit upstairs and downstairs. I do not know how this would effect powerline data transmission on most houses with at least 2 separate circuits.

Bought this as I needed to improve my WiFi signal from my BT home hub 2. Set up was easy, then set up as Mesh network. Was still losing Internet on hub, so switched the hub WiFi signal off, strangely the Internet has not dropped out once, and the speed through the adaptors is actually the speed I pay for. Yes, seems pricey but pretty well future proof for some years to come. Also worked better than I expected so happy with the cost. They are also pass through, where as some others that cost nearly as much using older technology don't, so another bonus. 18/4/21 I have now moved one adapter to a summerhouse 20m from the house which is fed by RCD spur, and it still works well keeping the wife happy with wifi in the summerhouse. The speed and connectivity is still brilliant.

I've been using inexpensive TP-Link 500Mbps extenders with additional nodes in my study and home cinema in quite a long house (27m). They worked fine, but over six years the TP-Link powerline transmitter connected to the router died twice, so I decided to upgrade. The devolo Magic 2-2400 Mbps whole house kit replacements are now up and running and provide very good WiFi coverage throughout the whole house, down to 50% in just two spots - one in a bathroom, and are so far stable. They are much larger than the TP-Link units, so large that they cover the mains socket switch they are attached to, and it's a bizarre design decision for a product intended for a domestic environment to have the network ports at the top of the units - this is always going to look ugly, but as the cinema unit is in a cupboard with the projection kit and the other is near the floor in a small study, it doesn't affect me. Installation, however, was a nightmare. Now I am not a network specialist, but I did work in IT consultancy for over 30 years, so am reasonably adept at installing and troubleshooting new software and hardware, and yes, I can read a manual. Reading other reviews, the essential problem seems to be that if you follow the very pared-down installation instructions step by step and it all works first time, you are a happy camper and you'll be up and running in 10 minutes. If it doesn't all work first time you may be entering a world of pain. The full online instruction manual has more pages, but tells you very little more. There is an amusing FAQ on the devolo web site where the question is posed: "How are Magic devices installed?" The "answer" provided is, "The devices connect automatically. You do not have to do anything." Who said the Germans had no sense of humour? On day one I spent approximately 3 hours attempting to install the devices, first pairing them (so that in theory two new devices each with its own security key should appear in your list of wireless connections) and then following the extra steps to create a mesh wireless network (utilising your existing router id and wireless key.) The manual is dumbed down almost to the point of uselessness. One of the first questions is raised when the manual recommends that you "make a note of the Wi-Fi key on the back of the devolo Magic adapter". At this point you pause because in the "whole home" kit you have two devolo Magic adapters, so which one do I use? The installation manual is specifically for the whole home kit, and has a picture of the three devices on the front... but there is no mention anywhere of the two WiFi keys question. In fact the manual has a space on the back page where you can write down "the" WiFi key. This point was also raised in a magazine review, where they suggested that maybe it's the first one you connect (it turns out that isn't necessarily so, for me it was the second.) It's not a large point, but it became significant later. Not being a complete idiot I wrote down the two WiFi keys, and Post-it noted each unit approprately, and also the security key on the transmitter unit (this key not mentioned in the manual at all) and of my existing hub/router itself. I also noted the steps I took on each attempt. By the way, the manual also said in English "the WiFi key on the back of the devolo Magic adapter". The other six languages said (in translation) "the WiFi key on the back of the devolo Magic WiFi adapter". So it became advisable to check some of the other language instructions at each step in case any other important words had been omitted in English. I followed all steps to pair the units. Unfortunately the manual doesn't call it "pairing" at this point and this becomes important when you recognise there are two processes to perform, pairing the units to create interlinked WiFi nodes, and THEN creating a meshed WiFi network with one unified WiFi key cloned from your hub. For the first process the manual refers to "connecting", "encryption", and then "set up WiFi connection on your smartphone etc." In the second process it does say that you can "Optionally use Mesh technology to connect all devolo Magic adapters and your router to a contiguous network..." Much later in the manual, after describing the indicator lights/buttons in six languages it mentions "Help: If automatic pairing during initial installation was unsuccessful, you can carry our manual pairing of the Magic adapters." Note that this is the first mention of the word "pairing" or "pair" and it's completely unclear whether this is a manual alternative to the first or second process! I managed to get one Magic WiFi adapter connected (white Powerline Connector light) and one not (red PLC). I had one devolo-460 listed in available WiFi connections, but neither of the WiFi keys worked (and nor did the main unit's security key, nor the router's WiFi key: I even tried them using the SSID on the back of each unit - Nada! I think I know what happened here. The unit that hadn't fully connected was the one supplying the WiFi key, not the WiFi key of the one that had connected, so I couldn't log on to the devolo-460 connection. Once again, "devolo-460" wasn't mentioned in the manual. I repeated this twice more and finally got all white lights. So, after 2 hours of fafffing about that was the "You do not have to do anything" part of the FAQ completely sorted! Now the Meshing. That just made things worse and I ended up with one WiFi unit's PLC light flashing white, the other flashing red. I couldn't log in to anything except my router, I still had the unloginable devolo-460 showing in my list of connections, and despite several attempts to reset to factory defaults I was unconvinced the units had actually reset. Three hours gone. Next morning I tried once more with no luck. I phoned the devolo help desk and was pleased to be number 2 in the queue, then quickly number 1, where I sat for 20 minutes. I though maybe this indicates they only have one help desk operator, and/or each problem takes about 20 minutes. Finally spoke a help-desk, a rather dour German who was abruptly dismissive of my attempts to enter the LAN unit's security key or the router WiFi key, before I explained in exasperation that if nothing else works you are led to attempt the implausible. After 35 minutes of starting from scratch we finally got through both processes to create a mesh WiFi system. Thirty-five minutes! That tells you that this was NOT straightforward. Several steps we had to repeat as they didn't "take" first time, and one step (creating the mesh) we had to repeat three times, moving the WiFi adapter closer and closer to the router until it managed to sync with the router's WPS process. When all that was done I located the units where they should be and they all reconnected fine, and (only 4 days later) everything seems stable. Main problems are an under-written installation guide that gives you no clue what to do if any step fails, sloppy structure and language translation where in an attempt to simplify things they manage to obscure meaning (e.g. "connection" or "basic installation" used instead of "pairing"; and "pairing" only used when describing how to use "manual pairing" when "automatic pairing" has failed - when by now you are not sure which of two processes this is. The fact it took 35 minutes to talk through and carry out the installation process for two WiFi adapters (it really was automatic with the TP-Link units) shows that when you have problems, you REALLY have problems, that can take a help-desk techie some time to bash through. So, including 55 minutes on the phone (including the 20 in the queue) that was a total of FOUR HOURS.

Firstly the positives. I purchased the Devolo Magic-2 2400 whole home to replace a set of ageing AV-500 adaptors. What a difference they have made to our home network! On our home computer which is the furthest machine away from our router the old adaptors used to give us around 8-9Mbps per second on a speed test. When first plugged in the new adaptors were showing 55-59Mbps per second. Even during busy times I regularly see high 38Mbps - 41Mbps per second. My Son's home computer which is closer regularly sees low to mid 60Mbs per second. We have also seen large improvements to our WiFi signal upstairs where the two satellite units are located. Again regularly seeing mid-high 40Mbps where would may see 20 at most being connected to the router. Now for the negatives, they are very expensive but I would say worth it based on what it has done in our home. The worst aspect for me though were the installation instructions were inaccurate and the associated iOS app woefully poor. The written instructions supplied and the App tell you to do two different things - in my case the App was correct which would be great if it didn't keep crashing, hanging or refusing to ackknowledge you had two adaptors on the network. Everytime I tried to join the WiFi Adaptors to my existing network it kept telling me they were not detected. It wasn't until I decided to use them as just home plugs and downloaded the Devolo Cockpit software that I could then see they had in-fact been configured on the network and were working as expected. The Devolo Cockpit Windows app is perfectly adequate and does the job - the iOS app is not and I can understand why it gets such appalling reviews. Please Devolo Fix it now. Overall summary - installation was far more torturous than what it should have been but now it is up and running I am extremely happy with the performance of the hardware.

Achtung - Gerät ist aufgrund UK Steckdosenanschluss nur für den Gebrauch in UK geeignet - das geht nicht unmittelbar aus der (deutschen) Beschreibung auf dieser Seite hervor.. Der Irrtum kostet einen dann in der Rücksendung 30 EUR