devolo GigaGate – WiFi bridge for your living room

The devolo GigaGate is a WiFi bridge with which you can establish a wireless network connection anywhere in the house. Handy for your living room, for example, where you need an internet connection for streaming. We have tested the GigaGate to find out whether this is really possible.

devolo GigaGate

Price:

€ 229,90

Connections:

1x gigabit network connection (base and satellite), 4x fast ethernet connection (satellite)

wireless link

802.11ac (four data streams 1733 Mbit/s)

Wireless Wi-Fi:

802.11n (two data streams, 300 Mbit/s)

Dimensions:

15 x 14 x 3 cm

To buy:

mediamarkt.nl 8 Score 80

• Pros
• Easy connection
• Good link speed
• Versatile placement

• Negatives
• Only one gigabit port

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Devolo's GigaGate is a so-called WiFi bridge: a combination of transmitter and receiver that are wirelessly connected via WiFi technology. Both boxes are equipped with an Ethernet port and in the base you can therefore consider the GigaGate as a 'wireless' network cable. For the wireless link between the base and satellite, 802.11ac is used with four data streams for a theoretical speed of 1733 Mbit/s. There are of course routers with similar specifications, but clients always have less powerful radios. Since the GigaGate is also equipped with the same powerful radio, the speed between the bridge and satellite should be excellent.

Easy installation

Devolo promises that the GigaGate is easy to install and it turns out to be true. The base has one gigabit network connection and you connect it to your wired network, in practice you will connect it to your router. All you need to do is plug in the power plug. The satellite puts you where you need internet. The connection to the base is set up automatically after which you can connect your equipment. The satellite is equipped with one gigabit network connection and four fast ethernet connections. For example, the gigabit connection is intended for your NAS, while the other ports are intended for your smart TV, media player and game console.

In addition, Devolo has integrated an 802.11n access point on the 2.4 GHz band into the satellite, which uses two data streams for a maximum speed of 300 Mbit/s. There is no WiFi access point in the base. According to devolo, GigaGate is therefore not a WiFi system or a replacement for your router. The Base does not contain any router options and a WiFi access point because, according to devolo, you will usually connect the base to your wireless router that already has both functions. Both the Bridge and Satellite have a web interface that you can use to adjust settings and update the firmware. For example, you can adjust the ssid of the Wi-Fi network to make the network the same as your normal wireless network.

Test results

We tested the GigaGate in practice. Our internet connection comes in on the ground floor while our living room is on the first floor. According to the indicator lights, the components are in good contact with each other. A speed test via the gigabit connection shows a speed of about 254 Mbit/s, while the fast Ethernet connections logically reach 94.4 Mbit/s. That speed of 254 Mbit/s is very neat in our situation and is much higher than the speed that wireless clients can get from our router on the ground floor. Of course, we also tested the built-in WiFi access point. This gives us a speed of 92.2 Mbit/s, which corresponds to what you can expect from the 2.4 GHz band these days.

Limits

In terms of speed, the GigaGate is fine and there is a good chance that the speed in your house is a lot higher if you do not want to bridge a floor. It makes sense that the link speed between the base and satellite is far from a gigabit speed. It therefore does not seem so bad that only one gigabit port is installed. Still, in our opinion, it would have been useful if the other four ports were also gigabit ports. Although fast Ethernet connections for a media player or smart TV are even fine for 4K streaming, in our opinion they are no longer of this time on a switch. After all, network traffic stays within a switch and with multiple gigabit ports you could, for example, connect both your NAS and your PC to the satellite and both devices could communicate at full speed. You can of course connect your own gigabit switch.

Conclusion

With the GigaGate, Devolo promises to have a simple solution to bring the internet signal to a place in the house where you cannot lay cables. We succeeded, because in our difficult test situation we can wirelessly lift a signal with a speed of 250 Mbit/s over a floor and that is just fine. What we do regret is that the built-in switch is not fully gigabit. Admittedly, this is not necessarily necessary for extending the internet signal and streaming 4K movies, but it is useful if you want to have two fast devices such as a PC and NAS communicate with each other via satellite in the same room. You should also realize that GigaGate is primarily a WiFi bridge and that devolo only sees the built-in WiFi access point as a kind of extra. GigaGate is therefore not a solution for wirelessly accessing files on your NAS in your living room at high speed from your laptop, for example.