Wi-Fi 6 access points for business
Start the year by boosting the speed and capacity of your wireless network. Dave Mitchell explains how to choose your ideal Wi-Fi 6 access point
“Users should see reliable and consistent data throughput even as the number of wireless clients increases”
I t’s taken a few years for Wi-Fi 6 – also known as 802.11ax – to gain a foothold, but it’s now a standard feature on laptops, smartphones and networking hardware. Any business still relying on a legacy wireless infrastructure should be building the new standard into its 2022 plans.
It’s not just about headline speeds. New working norms have brought an influx of mobile devices into the workplace, which means wireless networks are having to handle higher client densities than ever. Wi-Fi 6 allows large numbers of devices to access the network at once without degrading performance.
Don’t be put off by apprehensions about the price. When the first Wi-Fi 6 routers and access points (APs) started to appear in 2019 they were expensive, but intense competition has driven prices down hugely. Wi-Fi 6 is now wholly affordable for small and medium businesses (SMBs).
In this month’s buyer’s guide, we review four business-class Wi-Fi 6 access points, from DrayTek, Netgear, TP-Link and Ubiquiti Networks. With prices starting as low as £136 there’s something here for everyone, and we put each one through its paces in the lab to help you choose the right ones.
Tuning the radio
On a technical level, Wi-Fi 6 introduces several important new technologies. Perhaps the most important is an innovation called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA); this allows an access point to efficiently service a high density of devices at once by dividing wireless channels up into smaller frequency allocations (dubbed resource units, or RUs). In the real world, users should see reliable and consistent data throughput even as the number of wireless clients increases – something that can’t always be said for Wi-Fi 5.
Other Wi-Fi 6 features of note are Basic Service Set colouring, which helps reduce interference caused by channel congestion, and Target Wake Time power saving, which reduces mobile battery usage by allowing radios to spend most of their time powered down, only waking up at intervals to send and receive data. Wi-Fi 6 APs also support the latest WPA3 encryption standard, but for now the WPA2 option remains, to support legacy devices during the changeover.
This is a lot to get your head round, but the great thing is you don’t have to do anything to use it. All the APs on review
weave their Wi-Fi 6 magic in the background, with no complicated settings to configure. Indeed, the only user option is usually just to turn 802.11ax services on or off.
We’ve got the power
All business-class APs support Power over Ethernet (PoE), so a single cable can provide both the power and network connection. If you’re not using this already, then deploying a new fleet of APs presents a good opportunity to make the move. If you need only a small number of APs, then you can purchase individual PoE injectors for as little as £25 each, but for most businesses it will make more sense to invest in a PoE switch, allowing you to run multiple APs from one power supply. We recommend you choose a switch that delivers the most powerful 802.3bt PoE++ services: Wi-Fi 6 APs need more power than Wi-Fi 5 models, and performance may drop off if the AP can’t get all the watts it wants.
It’s also worth thinking about 2.5GbE connections. Many Wi-Fi 6 APs use this type of port because their wireless bandwidth exceeds the capacity of a regular Gigabit line. There are plenty of affordable multi-Gigabit switches available; for lab testing we use an EnGenius ECS2512FP switch, which has eight 2.5GbE ports, all supporting PoE++.
Walking in the cloud
A standalone AP may be fine for a small office, but larger businesses with multiple departments to cover – or even multiple sites – should consider cloud management. This allows all APs and wireless networks to be centrally managed, no matter where they’re physically located.
There are two common methods of cloud management, and they’re quite different, so ensure you pick the right one for your circumstances. The first type uses a hardware controller to manage all APs and wireless networks within a site. You can use a host PC as your controller, or most providers offer affordable pre-configured hardware appliances. Whichever you choose, the controller is registered with your cloud account, and selecting one from the web portal takes you to the relevant site settings.
In the second model, your APs are registered directly to your cloud account. You can create virtual sites within the web portal to represent your offices, and APs will broadcast the appropriate settings for whatever site they are members of.
Each method has its pros and cons. On-site appliances may be a good choice for large networks, as they keep most traffic on-site, while direct cloud connections are ideal for more spread-out businesses, as you don’t need to install a controller in every location.
Invisible touch
An additional advantage of cloud management is “zero-touch provisioning”; this means that, once an AP has been registered in the cloud portal, it simply needs to be plugged in and connected to the internet in order to pick up the appropriate settings and start broadcasting your network.
If you’re expecting your wireless network to grow, another feature worth considering is meshing. With mesh-enabled APs, you can simply install additional units as needed, and as long as they’re within wireless reach of an existing AP, they’ll connect to that and pick up the settings as needed. For the best performance, look for mesh APs that have a dedicated 5GHz backhaul radio, so that client bandwidth isn’t impacted by mesh data packets being forwarded back and forth between access points.
You might consider Wi-Fi 6 a luxury, but most businesses rely heavily on wireless networking to keep staff and customers connected. Upgrading to Wi-Fi 6 will keep your business running smoothly, and ensure you’re ready for the demands of the next generation of hardware and connected services.
Read on to see which of this month’s Wi-Fi 6 solutions will best turbo-charge your network.