Buyer’s guide to business wireless access points
Free your staff from their desks with smooth, streamlined wireless. Dave Mitchell explains what to look for and puts four wireless APs to the test
Dave Mitchell explains what to look for in a wireless access point and reviews four top options from the likes of Aruba, DrayTek, WatchGuard and Zyxel.
The move to wireless connections is inexorable – and it’s not just about staff wanting to work from their phones and tablets. Even before the pandemic, the traditional desktop PC was being supplanted by powerful, portable laptops. Now, with many workers dividing their time between home and the office, mobile working is the norm.
This doesn’t have to be a challenge. Most businesses already have some sort of wireless coverage. But as Wi-Fi takes centre stage and becomes the backbone of your office network, it becomes ever more crucial to ensure that your wireless provision is both reliable and secure.
The great news for SMBs is that bu siness-class access points (APs) have never been more affordable. This month, we review wireless solutions from Aruba, DrayTek, WatchGuard and Zyxel, all priced within easy reach of the smallest organisation. On the pages that follow, we’ll put each one through its paces in the lab, and test their management capabilities to help you choose the right one.
Radio Ga Ga
If you’re investing in Wi-Fi gear right now, you face a quandary: should you stick with tried and tested 802.11ac tech – now rebranded as Wi-Fi 5 – or is it time to future-proof your network with next-generation 802.11ax, also known as Wi-Fi 6?
The answer depends on several factors. If you only need to serve a modest number of users, and have no expectation that this will increase significantly, Wi-Fi 5 offers perfectly good performance and features at competitive prices. Look for a model that supports MU-MIMO (multi-user multiple input, multiple output), as this increases the number of available data lanes, reducing the effect of congestion when lots of Wi-Fi 5 clients are using the network at once. Note, however, that not all MU-MIMO implementations are equal: an AP with 2x2 MU-MIMO can support two data streams, whereas 4x4 models support twice as many streams, enabling them to give full performance to more users at once.
If you need to serve a large or growing userbase, Wi-Fi 6 could be a
“If you only need to serve a modest number of users, Wi-Fi 5 offers perfectly good performance at competitive prices”
better bet as it’s designed to support many more simultaneous streams. We’ve seen considerable performance improvements from these APs, even when using older Wi-Fi 5 clients – and if your staff have Wi-Fi 6 laptops and smartphones, they’ll see faster connection speeds too.
As you might expect, Wi-Fi 6 tends to come with a price premium, but prices are dropping all the time. Go back just a year and the first units on the market cost around £1,000. This month, on p99, we review the Zyxel WAX510D Unified Access Point, a Wi-Fi 6 AP that costs only £215.
Cloud connected
Most APs have a built-in web console that can be used to configure and manage your wireless services. But, unless your office is quite small, you will probably want to deploy multiple APs to avoid dead spots – so it makes sense to choose units that can work together and be managed centrally. Typically, a centralised management portal will allow you to create secure wireless networks, decide which APs will broadcast them and keep an eye on network health, client connections and bandwidth usage.
Many modern APs also support cloud management, which lets you monitor and manage all your APs no matter where they’re physically located. This is perfect for businesses with geographically distributed offices, or ones that are providing infrastructure to homeworkers.
For the easiest deployment, look for “zero-touch provisioning”. This allows you to register and configure new units in the cloud portal, then simply send them to their intended location. Once the AP is connected to the internet, it will automatically download your settings and start working as desired.
Another feature that larger offices will appreciate is meshing. This lets one network-connected AP act as a “master”, while all the other units serve as “node” devices. These units relay their traffic via the master AP, and get their settings from it. For the best mesh performance, look for APs that have a separate 5GHz backhaul radio, providing a dedicated highspeed connection to the master AP that doesn’t eat into the bandwidth available to client devices.
Another useful feature is Powerover-Ethernet (PoE) support, which allows APs to be powered directly over an Ethernet cable, rather than requiring a separate power supply. Most vendors nowadays expect you to use PoE, and only offer a mains adapter as an optional extra.
To add power to a regular Ethernet connection, you can use a standalone PoE injector; if you have lots of devices to power, consider a PoE switch, which can drive multiple APs from a single socket. For Wi-Fi 5 APs, we recommend a switch that supports the 802.3at PoE+ standard. Wi-Fi 6 APs may require the more powerful 802.3bt PoE++ standard, though – and if they don’t get enough juice, they might drop back to a slower co nfiguration.
Be my guest
As well as benefiting your staff, a robust wireless network lets you provide customers and clients with on-site internet access. It’s a small thing, but one that customers respond positively to.
The best way to handle this is to set up a separate guest network that gives visitors internet access while keeping them isolated from the main network. Security needs to be airtight, so check that your APs provide features such as Layer 2 (L2) isolation, which stops users on the same wireless network from seeing each other.
If you’re offering guest access, it’s also advisable to choose an AP that can redirect guests to a captive portal (or “splash page”), where you can require them to agree to an acceptable use policy before continuing. For a really professional look, some APs let you customise the captive portal with your company logo and other content.
With more and more businesses adopting a wireless-first approach to networking, APs have an increasingly important role to play. The solutions we examine this month cover a wide range of deployment scenarios and budget – read on to see which is the ideal one to untether your workforce from their desks.