Zyxel NWA1123-AC PRO
A standalone wireless AP with good performance – and a bargain price that will appeal to small businesses
DSCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £92 exc VAT from.ebuyer.com esigned for standalone use in home offices and small businesses, Zyxel’s NWA1123AC PRO is the definition of a fuss-free wireless AP. Costing less than £100, it’s great value – especially since the price includes a Gigabit PoE injector.
It’s not short on features, either: it’s an AC1750 AP that supports concurrent 2.4GHz 802.11n and 5GHz 802.11ac operations, supporting up to eight SSIDs on each band. It can be ceiling- or wall-mounted using the backplate conveniently included in the kit, but there are no T-rail clips, so you’ll need to make your own arrangements if you want to hang it from a suspended ceiling.
On initial installation, the AP presents open SSIDs on both bands. This probably isn’t what you want, but it’s easy to reconfigure. When you open up the web interface for the first time, a wizard helps you set the correct country and configure SSIDs and security settings. We were also able to upgrade the AP’s firmware to the latest version, which delivers an improved web interface and more status information.
The web dashboard displays useful details such as AP resource utilisation and WLAN interface status, and each widget can be dragged around the page to create a layout that reflects your priorities.
When it comes to customising your wireless settings, Zyxel’s approach to profiles and objects might seem a little daunting at first. You start at the AP Management page, which lets you set up SSID profiles; here you can enter the desired SSID name, decide whether it will be broadcast or hidden, enable QoS to prioritise voice or video traffic and apply upload and download rate limits. Separate profiles cover encryption schemes, MAC address filtering lists and Layer 2 isolation (which stops wireless clients from seeing each other).
Then, from the Object menu, you create a radio profile, determining options such as channel width and whether to use 802.11n or 802.11ac. With this done, you can pick an SSID profile and assign it to your radio profile, after which it will immediately become active.
Although there’s no continuous monitoring for rogue APs, the interface lets you switch one or both radios to monitor mode, to scan your
“The free ZON tool searches the network for Zyxel devices, and lists them all in one interface for easy access”
premises and create lists of trusted and unrecognised access points. We found this worked fine – it detected 42 other APs in our office environment – but you’d be better off having another AP dedicated to this task full-time.
A few useful desktop utilities are offered too. The free ZON (Zyxel One Network) tool searches the network for Zyxel devices, and lists them all in one interface for easy access. Our AP was immediately discovered, and we were presented with a direct link to its web dashboard, along with options to update its IP address, reboot it, reset it and upgrade its firmware.
The ZAC (Zyxel AP Configurator) meanwhile provides direct access to AP configurations, allowing them to be stored on the ZAC host and pushed to multiple APs remotely. Alas, this doesn’t currently support the latest AP firmware, and an update isn’t expected until early 2018.
Performance is as good as you could ask for: close-range file copies from a Windows 10 Pro desktop equipped with a Netgear AC1200 USB 3 adapter averaged 55MB/sec, falling slightly to 50MB/sec at a distance of 10m. Coverage is up to par too; the SweetSpots app on our iPad lost the connection only after we’d wandered 41m away, putting five other offices between us and the AP.
If you’re looking for a simple, low-cost wireless AP, the NWA1123AC PRO is a worthy contender. It isn’t the easiest to configure, but it ticks a lot of boxes, and it’s great value – especially when you factor in the inclusion of that Gigabit PoE injector in the box.
SPECIFICATIONS Dual-band 2.4GHz/5GHz 802.11ac 3 x 3 MIMO internal aerials 2 x Gigabit (LAN and PoE/PoE+) Gigabit PoE injector included ceiling/wall mounting plate 204 x 192 x 35mm (WDH) 445g Limited lifetime