EnGenius ECW336

It's expensive, but this tri-band Wi-Fi 6E AP offers top performance and great cloud management services

- DAVE MITCHELL

EnGenius offers businesses a fine choice of wireless access points (APs) and the ECW336 is its most powerful yet. This tri-band AP supports the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and Wi-Fi 6E 6GHz bands, as well as the 6GHz high-speed 160MHz channels, and boasts a maximum throughput of 8.4Gbits/sec, giving it an impressive AX8400 rating.

The ECW336 presents 12 spatial streams spread equally across the three radios, claiming top speeds of 1,184Mbits/sec, 2,400Mbits/sec and 4,800Mbits/sec respectively. EnGenius ensures there are no bottlenecks to worry about, as the ECW336 is the first SMB-class AP we’ve seen to sport a 5GbE multigigabit network port.

The network port supports PoE+ and that’s how you’re expected to power it; although there’s a power jack alongside, an adapter isn’t included. For testing, we connected the AP to the lab’s Zyxel XS1930-12HP 10GbE multi-gigabit PoE++ switch.

The ECW336 is designed to be managed using EnGenius’s cloud portal. Its local web browser interface doesn’t provide access to any configuration settings and only displays an overview of LAN, internet and cloud connection status. Adding the AP to our cloud account was swift, and we used the Cloud To-Go iOS app on an iPad to scan the QR code on its base.