EnGenius ECW520

Not the best value, but this tri-band Wi-Fi 7 AP delivers good performance and smart cloud management

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As an early entrant into the Wi-Fi 7 market, EnGenius boasts an impressive portfolio of access points, and its latest ECW520 claims to offer SMBs a high-performing solution at an affordable price point. It certainly has the hardware to handle high demand: it's powered by the same Qualcomm Networking Pro 1220 platform and quad-core ARM Cortex-A73 CPU as EnGenius' flagship ECW536 (see issue 365, p98).

This tri-band BE10800-rated AP presents six spatial streams spread equally across its 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz radios, and claims maximum speeds of 700Mbits/sec, 4.300Mbits/sec and 5,800Mbits/sec respectively. Its single 2.5GbE multi-gig port only requires a PoE+ source and, although there's a power jack alongside, an adapter is an optional purchase.

All ECW models are managed directly from the EnGenius cloud portal. Their local web interfaces don't provide access to any configuration settings and only display LAN, internet and cloud management status.

We connected the AP to the lab's EnGenius ECS2512FP cloud-managed 2.5GbE POE+ switch and used the Cloud To-Go iOS app on an iPad to scan its QR code.