Devolo WiFi Repeater+ ac – Hardware Review
With the world still very much being in lockdown, working from home has become a reality for many. Trips to the office have become rare, and finding a suitable workspace in your home might not always be that easy to find. Working in your living room may be attractive, but it can also offer a lot of distractions keeping you from your work or making it hard to have calls or online meetings due to noise from other people in the house. It might finally be useful to use that small office room you decorated all those years ago, at least after clearing out the dust and cobwebs. That being said, your home internet connection often services the living room for entertainment after a long day of work. It might then be recommended that you add an extra WiFi extender (or repeater) to your setup to improve the connection to your new remote office room (or your newly furbished gaming room). For this purpose, we were given the chance to try out Devolo’s WiFi Repeater+ ac, which adds an additional hotspot to your setup.
Upon opening the box, we were greeted by a chunky white transmitter with no special bells and whistles. The Devolo name can be subtly read on the front of the device, as well as some smaller buttons on the Repeater’s front plate. The device also incorporates an ac plug, which means that you will not lose the outlet you plug this device into. Other than it being somewhat bulky, it doesn’t have that many distinguishable features, which is actually a good thing if you want it to easily blend with many people’s design choices of the room the Repeater+ ends up in.
In the past installing these repeaters could be somewhat tedious, but the Repeater+ ac has several ways of setting it up, be it with the press of a button, or simply by using the Devolo Home Network app. It will depend on your router as well as how smooth the actual installation goes. For the most part, it’s just a plug and play device that supports 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz and with it being a ‘mesh’ device, things are quite easy, making sure you don’t lose connection when switching to this new access point. The mesh capabilities mean that it’s all one big WiFi network now. The device still broadcasts properly through several walls, albeit with slightly more data loss the further you go.
Perhaps not that relevant for the high-tech fans reading this review, but the Repeater+ comes with two Ethernet ports, allowing two older devices to be connected to the device. This allows the device that connects with Devolo’s hardware to actually surf the internet as well, without having to have a cable pulled through the entire house or walls. This is a nice touch for those still having that old school desktop in a remote room.
There is hardly any data loss when using this transmitter for your internet connection. We do once again wish to stress that these devices are no miracle solutions to getting a better connection, be it in terms of download or upload speed. If the speed of your connection is already bad, it will not serve as a booster for said problems. These speeds depend solely on your provider, your place of residence, and so on. We often see people confuse these repeaters as upgrades for their internet subscriptions.
Conclusion
While looking like a very standard device, the WiFi Repeater+ ac is actually a rather impressive device. Not only does it offer a proper solution to a bad signal in certain portions of your house or apartment, but it also offers a solution for older Ethernet devices while also properly supporting new ‘mesh’ technology and the option to broadcast on the two main frequencies. While not being the cheapest piece of technology for one hotspot, it offers an impressive ratio when it comes to quality vs price.
Devolo WiFi Repeater+ ac - Hardware Review,
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