Today at Atelier Kaz - ex-Honda R&D, F1, Indy/CART engineer

While the owners were at my place, from time to time, I was asked similar questions regarding the equipments I use for the presentation during our meeting, ICE devices connected to the USA Spec PA11-HON inside my NSX, etc so hope the following information helps some of the owners.


For the home network, I normally don't like using the router provided from the ISP as I have no idea what they are doing in the background so I always use the third party ones.
Currently, I'm using the 11ac wireless router from ASUS and quite happy with its features and performance.
I also have several 11ac wireless travelling routers and since they are fairly new, it can be switched into different modes such as the access point,, repeater, etc.
I have all these old spec 11b/g/n routers from ISP but they are just sitting in the box.

The wifi signal strength depends not only by the wifi router connected to the WAN but also the actual wifi signal strength of the devices connected such as your tablet/fablet, mobile phone, etc (echo back to the wireless router) so it can't be judged by just the router but within my house, it is pretty much covered with 5GHz frequency band apart from the end of the upstairs room.

Some of my old equipments such as the Freesat receiver only came with the RJ45 connector.
I could have used one of the router in the converter mode but considering the future expansion, I decided to get the HomePlug based equipment.



My house is fairly new so should have better chance of getting good throughput compared to the power lines in the very old houses. It's also affected by other appliances connected around the house since it's going to share the power line so the actual throughput would be different from one house to the other. And of course, the throughput is significantly affected by the power line length between the adaptors so if you live in a huge castle, you will need extra investment.

After some research, went for the devolo dLAN 650 triple+. It seems to cost bit extra than the similar spec from other manufactures such as TP-Link, BT, Netgear, etc.
There is a later spec and faster model 1200+ on the market and you can even get 1200+ with built-in 11ac wifi model but as I have many wifi devices that can act as the access point, not much point in getting the built-in wifi model and to me, these 'latest spec' becomes 'things of past' within just 6 months so couldn't justify the extra cost.


As long as it meets the HomePlug latest spec, any adapters from different manufactures will be able to connect each others. So, if you are already using one of these HomePlug adapters, you can connect them with this 650+ as long as they are not the ancient ones.

Fairly simple package and it doesn't even come with any software discs. Two CAT5e network cables were included.
You will need to download the 'Cockpit' software from devolo website and in fact, this software is quite well designed and user friendly.

Only £10 difference between the single and triple ports and for my usage, wanted to have at least two ports so easy decision.


For best performance, it's recommended to connect it directly to the wall socket and not on the extension lead but I did try it and while the throughput dropped, it worked at fairly reasonable speed at the first socket of the extension lead even with the surge filter in place.




When there is no network devices powered up, it goes into sleep mode to save energy. The power LED blinks every 30sec or so in this mode. If you prefer, you can switch off the LED completely through the software.




The software is very handy to setup the security password, adding extra adaptors, etc.
For setting up the security, you can use the tiny switch on the side of each adaptors to generate random pass code and pressing the switch on all of the adaptors within the specified time frame, all units will be protected from the outside world.
I prefer taking full control by myself so just setup my own password through the software.


Works great for my house downstairs and upstairs so if you have difficulty in getting strong wifi signal, this could be one of the option.


Kaz