Review: EnGenius ECW120 Cloud Managed 11ac Wave 2 Indoor Wireless Access Point
WiFi is a huge deal these days for business. Especially in the age of IoT. You need to have good speed and good coverage to keep your workers and devices happy. The best way to do this is to deploy wireless access points throughout your environment. And EnGenius has one in the form of the ECW120 Cloud Managed 11ac Wave 2 Indoor Wireless Access Point which is very much worth looking at:
It looks good and will fit into any decor. Plus it won’t attract any negative attention. That’s a good thing.
Here are the key specs:
- Dual-radio 2×2 802.11ac/a/b/g/n with MU-MIMO & Beamforming technology
- Supports up-to 867 Mbps in 5-GHz band & 400 Mbps in 2.4-GHz band
- Compliance with 802.3af & 48V power over Ethernet input for flexible installation up-to 328 feet
- MU-MIMO support
You get everything in the box to mount this on a wall or a ceiling, except a power adapter despite having a plug for a power adapter. That’s not a big deal as this access point supports power over ethernet. So if you pair it with a switch that supports power over Ethernet, you’re golden.
Setup is pretty easy using the EnGenius App which makes the process insanely easy. It walks you through everything you need to do to get it online, keep your firmware up to day, and observe and manage performance. The app has one other advantage. All the functionality is free. That’s a total win.
In terms of what this access point can do, the list includes 802.11r and Captive Portal which has various Authentication Types. That increases the possible use cases that this access point can be used in. In terms of performance, it seemed to be very consistent when I threw a bunch of IoT devices at it along with some high bandwidth devices. It wasn’t insanely fast, but I don’t think it has to be. When I set these sort of devices up for my clients, I prefer to have strong consistent performance as it is more important for devices to be able to get online and stay online than to have the fastest speeds known to man. That’s not to say that it is slow because it isn’t. In terms of range, I was able to pick up the 2.4 GHz band from the back of my condo building 12 stories below my unit. That was impressive. It also means that you likely need fewer access points to cover your space with WiFi.
If you need wireless access points, the EnGenius ECW120 Cloud Managed 11ac Wave 2 Indoor Wireless Access Point is a nice solid choice. It’s $199 on Amazon in the US but can be found for less if you look around.
May 21, 2021 at 9:59 am
[…] involved for those who aren’t used to doing this sort of thing. That’s because unlike this access point that I reviewed recently from EnGenius. This isn’t a cloud managed access point out of the box unless you have a EnGenius SkyKey […]