Recently as part of building renovations I wanted to replace some older Devolo Ethernet over power adapters and consolidate some wireless access points from various suppliers into something more standard and manageable. Enter the Magic Wifi 2 Next multiroom kit from Devolo.
This ticked both boxes for wired connections and wireless in the one set of equipment. If you have not used Ethernet over Power or Home Plug adapters as they are sometimes known – they allow ethernet connections to be carried over the mains wiring to form a network link. Previously I used them for streaming video and this working flawlessly for several years.
In this incarnation though – there are some great advances. Firstly speed. The units are theoretically capable of 2400 MBPS throughput although I have seen nothing like that in my particular installation. Secondly the multi room kit comes as one single ethernet plug and two wireless plus with dual gigabit ethernet ports instead of the original single ethernet ports of their predecessors. There is also an app that shows the speeds between the components when installed which is where I see that my speeds are much lower but fine for my use case.
The other major point is that you can add to the 3 components – in fact my requirement needed two sets of three adapters to provide the connectivity (between two lans in two buildings connected electrically) and the wireless coverage for three stories of a building.
The configuration is fairly simple – you can either use the app (I would if doing it again) or you can manually pair the devices to the “master” or first device. The app allows for the tailoring of the setup – for example setting wireless channels and ssids and other security options.
When in operation the status leds for wired and wireless are white. Red indicates an issue with connection or quality of link. You can name the devices to make it easier to understand the topology of your network through the Devolo Cockpit app (available for windows, mac and linux)
If you want to find out more about the Devolo Magic Wifi 2 products take a look at their site
There is also a mobile app called Devolo home network that lets you check the status of the devices as shown below
