Belkin F5D4074UKS review

Belkin’s F5D4074UKS HomePlug AV adaptor looks quite sleek, with its compact form and glossy black finish, but there’s little else to set it apart from the crowd – there are no screens, electrical socket pass-through or any other bells and whistles.

This might come as something of a surprise to anyone who’s had a look at the price of the adaptor – at £48, it’s more expensive that Solwise’s award-winning NET-PL-200AV-PIGGY adaptor, which has a mains pass-through. It even approaches the price of the adaptors in Devolo’s feature-packed, super-fast dLAN 200 AVsmart+ Starter Kit.

Unfortunately, if you were expecting a good turn of speed from the F5D4074UKS, you’re in for a disappointment. It achieved a throughput of just 31.18Mbit/s in our tests, making it the slowest HomePlug AV device we’ve ever tested.

The F5D4074UKS is listed on Belkin’s site as coming with “extension power cables for the optional placement of Powerline adapter away from the electrical outlet”, which would have been very handy for use with power sockets in inconvenient locations, but the adaptors no longer ship with this.

At almost £50 for each adaptor (although a set of two is available for around £70) and with the slowest transfer speeds we’ve seen from a HomePlug AV device, there’s little to recommend the F5D4074UKS apart from a lifetime warranty. We prefer Solwise’s NET-PL-200AV-PIGGY, which costs less, has an electrical socket pass-through and shifts data faster.