D-Link DHP-W307 AV review

D-Link’s DHP-W307 AV kit consists of a pair of HomePlug AV powerline networking adaptors, one of which doubles as a wireless access point. You can use the kit to send a network signal through your home’s wiring, then broadcast it wirelessly at the other end. Much like other powerline adapters, it’s a useful way of extending wireless coverage throughout your home, without having do anything complicated with range-extending router functions such as WDS.

As with all powerline kits we’ve seen recently, it’s easy to set up a secure connection between the two adaptors – just press a button on each to set up the encrypted link. If you want to assign your own password to the adaptors you can use the supplied software, which shows you any adaptors it has detected on the network. Homeplug AV adaptors are meant to be compatible with each other even if they’re from different manufacturers, but we couldn’t get the D-Link software to see our Solwise NET-PL-200-AV-PIGGY_MK2 adaptor; we’d recommend using the Atheros Power Packet utility instead.

The kit uses the slower HomePlug AV standard, which has a theoretical maximum speed of 200Mbit/s, compared to the 500Mbit/s of the latest HomePlug kits such as Netgear’s AV+ 500 reviewed last month. This is still fast enough to transfer files at 65Mbit/s in our tests – the DHP-W307 AV is one of the faster HomePlug AV kits we’ve seen. Unfortunately, the adaptors don’t have mains passthrough ports and are too fat to sit alongside other devices in many four-way plugs, so you’ll sacrifice a couple of mains sockets to use them.

The wireless access point adaptor has built-in 802.11n wireless and a 10/100 network port, so you can connect both wired and wireless devices. You set up wireless encryption through a simple web-based wizard, which also gives you a couple of other options such as MAC address filtering. It’s not a wireless router – you’ll still change most of your network’s parameters in your main router’s setup pages.

Results in our wireless file transfer tests were mixed. With our reference Centrino 2 laptop, we saw 20.31Mbit/s in our 10m test, which is fairly standard result for a router at that range. However, when we moved the laptop to just 1m away, the speed only increased to 20.55Mbit/s, which is around half what we’d expect as such close range. Enabling and disabling channel bonding, which uses two wireless channels in combination to try to increase throughput, made almost no difference to transfer speeds – we’d recommend leaving this turned off to cut down on interference with your neighbours’ networks.

D-Link’s DHP-W307 AV gives you fast transfer speeds, and its built-in wireless access point makes it particularly good value. It’s a simple way to extend wireless coverage throughout your home, but fairly slow wireless transfer speeds mean it’s not really suitable for large file transfers or streaming high-definition video wirelessly.