Wireless is great, but when the signal drops or interference from neighbouring networks slows throughput to a crawl it loses its gloss somewhat. Installing Cat-5 cabling is an alternative, but hacking away the walls in your beloved home might not meet approval from the rest of your family.

Powerline networking, however, offers both fast and reliable networking using your home's existing mains wiring. Plug a powerline adapter into your router and all wall sockets suddenly become potential network points: simply plug additional adapters in and then attach them to a network device (be it a laptop, desktop or media streamer) using an Ethernet cable.

Sadly this industry is at war with itself in terms of standards. There are three main powerline groups: HomePlug, UPA (as used here by the D-Link DHP-302) and HD-PLC. Although all devices are supposed to be able to coexist, they're not interoperable so you won't get a HomePlug device working with a UPA or HD-PLC one, for example.

D-Link's DHP-303 is a starter kit consisting of two powerline adapters. The devices are fairly large compared with other adapters on the market, so if your mains sockets are very close together you may find that plugging an adapter in means you won't be able to use the adjacent socket. In our test location, we also found they pushed up against the socket's power switch, which isn't ideal.

The 10/100Mbps Ethernet port sits on the underside, waiting to be connected to whatever it is you're trying to network. The eagle-eyed among you will be wondering why D-Link didn't go for a Gigabit port since the devices are rated at 200Mbps; you'll find out why when we talk about performance in a moment.

As with all powerline kit, setting up the adapters is a breeze. Simply plug the two adapters into the devices that need to be networked and you're away. Thanks to buttons on the adapters themselves, you can quickly secure the powerline network (push the button on one, then do the same on the other within 30 seconds).

Security isn't a huge concern where powerline is concerned since the signal almost definitely won't stray beyond your home's main fuse box, but if you live in a shared house you may appreciate being able to quickly secure it.

D-Link supplies a software utility that, among other things, lets you assign quality of service (QoS) settings to the powerline network in order to give priority to certain traffic, for example media streaming.

In the same way that you'll never achieve 300Mbps with 802.11n wireless, you need to take the 200Mbps speeds quoted by powerline manufacturers with a fistful of salt. In our tests, we achieved between 40Mbps and 60Mbps when transferring files, which is roughly similar to what you'll get with rival adapters.

You need to be careful what you plug the adapters into, though. Multi-plug adapters, especially those with surge protectors, can play havoc with speeds; when we plugged the DHP-303 adapters into a multi-plug adapter, speeds plummeted to just 10Mbps.

Verdict
At £99 the D-Link DHP-303 powerline starter pack is similarly priced to rival offerings. We've certainly no problem with the adapters' performance, nor their ease-of-use. The only real issue we have is that their bulky nature means they may block off neighbouring sockets. Plus, of course, we'd like to see them housing the 400Mbps powerline chips that the industry has been promising for well over a year now.

Company: D-Link

Contact: 020 8955 9000

Tags: homeplug ethernet power line communication d-link gigabit ethernet wi-fi gigabit data communications