ACCESS POINT EnGenius ECW260
A heavily armouredarmour outdoor Wi-Fi 6 AP offeringofferin great performance and cloud management at a good price
SCORE
PRICE £363 exc VAT from solwise.co.uk
T here are plenty o of 802.11ax access points to choose from, but most o of them are designed for indoo indoor installation. EnGenius EnGenius’ ECW260 brings the performance of Wi-Fi 6 into the great outdoors. Its innards are protected b by an IP67rated metal housing, so s it should h ld be b more than up to the ch challenges of the British weather – it’s totally dusttight and can even handle full immersion in a metre of water for 30 minutes.
As for technical capabilities, we’re looking at a dual-band AP claiming speeds of up to 1,200Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 574Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band. It connects back to your network through a 2.5GbE multiGigabit LAN port located behind the weatherproof grommet in its base; note that there’s no socket for an external power supply, so you’ll need a PoE+ power source.
The kit includes a sturdy metal bracket for wall mounting, with cutouts allowing it to be placed on a pole using circular clamps. A heavy-duty grounding cable is provided too, along with self-tapping screws for dry walls, and the back of the AP has four standoff lugs to aid with cooling.
The ECW260 is designed to be primarily y cloudmanaged, g and to set it up you’ll need a free EnGenius Cloud account.
This service allows you to manage any number of sites, or organisations, and all the cloudenabled APs and switches contained within them.
Before adding APs to your account, it’s worth configuring your wireless networks first; these will then be pushed out automatically when your access points come online. Up to eight SSIDs per site are supported, and for each one you can decide which radios are active, choose whether to enforce WPA3 encryption, enable application analysis and apply rate limits for the entire SSID or per client.
One feature of the portal that’s particularly relevant to the ECW260 is the ability to set separate groups of settings to be applied to internal and external APs. You may, however, notice that you have little control over Wi-Fi 6 settings: you can choose whether h to enable nable or disable 802.11ax 11ax support on selected ted radios, but that’s s it. For more control, trol, EnGenius offers a chargeable Pro version sion of the cloud d portal. l Along l g with enhanced network topology logy views and d wireless heatmaps, ps, the timeline feature provides a seven-day view of all APs connected ected to b by a specified d client, along with the authentication methods used and nd details of association errors such ch as incorrect passwords.
EnGenius is working on an intriguing exposure-analysis l tool ool too, which h could b be useful f l in these h uncertain times. Developed as a contact-tracing aid, it lets you select a client l from the portal and d view w all other users that associated with h the same AP over a period of seven days. When the tool officially launches hes early in 2022 you’ll get the first year free, with ongoing pricing expected ected to be around £37 per device per year.
To register the AP you can enter the unit’s serial number in the portal, or use the Cloud To-Go iOS app to scan in the QR code on the base. We chose the latter option and the ECW260 was instantly added to our site; moments later it had received our wireless settings and was broadcasting the SSIDs. The cloud service also detected that our review unit was in need of a firmware upgrade, and automatically downloaded and applied it.
Although the ECW260 doesn’t support high-performance 160MHz channels, it delivered superb speeds in our real-world tests. Large file copies between a Windows 10 Pro workstation equipped with a TP-Link Archer TX3000E Wi-Fi 6 PCI-E adapter and a server on the LAN averaged a speedy 103MB/sec at close range, dropping to 82MB/sec when we moved the AP 20m away.
The EnGenius ECW260 is an excellent AP for any business wanting to extend Wi-Fi 6 services to an outdoor area. Its casing can handle most weather extremes, Wi-Fi 6 performance is very good and cloudmanagement services are beyond reproach.
SPECIFICATIONS
AX1800 Wave 2 dual-band 2.4GHz/5GHz 802.11ax 1.8GHz quad-core ARM Cortex A53s CPU 2 x 2 MU-MIMO 2 x 2.4GHz/2 x 5GHz external aerials 2.5GbE LAN/PoE+ wall plate, pole mount clamps, earth strap 190 x 124 x 53mm (WDH without aerials) 700g 2yr hardware warranty
“The kit includes a sturdy metal bracket for wall mounting, with cut-outs allowing it to be placed on a pole using circular clamps”