A blinking red light, or similar indicator, on a device can often be used as an alert to raise attention that there is some kind of intervention or attention required. So, when we recently connected up our devolo dLAN 200 AV Wireless N and saw a little house shaped icon blinking red we were somewhat curious as to what this meant.

The Devolo dLAN, uses your home electricity circuit, to extend the network around your home and, in some circumstances, can offer a wireless-like connection in areas where a typical wired connection is impractical or where a straight Wi-Fi connection is problematic.

To learn more about the Devolo dLAN see our article: Wireless and Power Line Networking With devolo HomePlug AV Starter Kit.

Upon reading about the potential issue we found the small house icon represents dLAN specific activity (that it is using the home electricity supply – as the devolo can also act as a Wi-Fi hotspot).

The colour Red, as described on the image, indicates that the current state of the network connection “is suitable for simple data transfer and Internet access” and that the indicator blinks during data transmission.

When using the devolo for a power line connection a secondary unit, in this case a 200 AVmini, is used at the receiving end of the signal (and both devices are plugged into the mains) to extend the circuit and when checking the dLAN Cockpit application (the control panel shipped with the device) the connection between the two devices was showing a very low Mbps (Megabits per second)  – a long way from the theoretical maximum of 200 Mbps.

UPDATE: Upon exploring this further we actually found the receiver (the 200 AVmini) had been unplugged from a wall mounted socket to an had been inserted into a four-way extension (to make room for a Nintendo 3DS charger!), which is not an optimal arrangement, and swapping the arrangement back the dLAN indicator jumped back to green – indicating a much stronger signal – at present it is sitting around 82 Mbps.

It is worth noting that the overall quality of the in-house electrical supply plays an important part in power line networking so it is worth trying the AVmini receiver in different zones, and different sockets, within the home to see which offers the optimum performance for your particular setup.