DevoloMESH 2-2400 Wi-Fi 5 Whole Home Kit | 3x Magic Mesh Wi-Fi 5 Adapters | 4k/ 8k UHD Streaming | Stable Home Working (Up to 2400 Mbps Powerline Backbone, Mesh Wi-Fi 5, G.hn, 6x Gb ports)

I purchased the Devolo Magic 2 kit looking for an increase in performance over my existing homeplugs as I'd invested a fair bit in my home AV setup in order to stream UHD content.After a short period of use, the plugs began to lose connectivity intermittently with the problem only being resolved by a reboot of the plug. They remained stable for a day or so but then quickly began to lose connectivity again.I was put in touch with the customer support at Devolo via Amazon and spoke to one of their representatives directly. Immediately I was fobbed off by being told that the wiring in my house was at fault, despite this being a new build house and my previous plugs maintaining a solid connection, having been powered on 24/7 for 2-3 years at least.I pressed them to go through the motions of troubleshooting the plugs. We tried a number of tests, involving changing the negotiation and speed settings, as well as different sockets in the house. None of these tests gave any significant improvement in speed or stability and after all this had been done, the engineer simply reverted to the 'wiring' being at fault.I'm a senior IT professional with a specialism in data networks, so I am familiar with general IT troubleshooting. Given that the fault persisted across multiple plug sockets and that I have older homeplugs which function correctly in the same environment, it was evident that the plugs are at fault. The engineer wouldn't back down, nor offer me a replacement.In short, the stability of the plugs and the unwillingness of support to provide me with a replacement under warranty leads this to a 1 star review.

These are the most expensive Powerline adapters that I've seen in the UK. They don't fare much better than HomePlug AV2 1200 adapters in most practical situations but shine particularly with difficult rooms like extensions and sheds. For most rooms in our house, we get between 62Mb/s and 239Mb/s with these adapters.For the price, a single ethernet socket on the adapters seems cheap, other adapters in the higher price band have at least two ports. The ethernet port is also on the top of the adapter which makes the wiring a bit uglier.These adapter are quite bulky and rise up over the socket and thus make it hard to reach the power switch in the socket should you need to.There is more throughput data on these adapters in my blog post comparing them to HomePlug AV2 1000 and 1200 adapters if you search online for "specklepattern G.hn versus HomePlug".

Due to Virgin Media's Hub 3.0 having this new fangled, WiFi stops working whenever it feels like it, feature... working from home was a nightmare. I often upload / download large files from the works cloud, and with Virgin Media's Hub 3.0 having a spider-sence type ability to cut my computers Wifi in the middle of said uploading / downloading, it was causing me to pretty much go insane.After installing this baby, boom... no drop in connection, no problems, no fuss and was up and running in about 2 mins flat. Totally worth every penny! Works great with super high speed cable / fibre solutions and has changed my life (work life) forever!!!I do however feel a little sorry for the Hub 3.0 as it will have no-one to talk to now, as I'll no longer be stood in front of it, threatening its stupid little box shaped face with a claw hammer!Top Product (not the hub 3.0)

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.

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.