Firewalla Access Point 7 Desktop

The perfect Wi-Fi 7 partner for Firewalla's appliances with great security and wireless performance

- DAVE MITCHELL

Firewalla’s security appliances have always impressed, offering a fine combination of features, performance and value. This makes them a great choice for SMBs, and the company is now extending its expertise into the WiFi 7 space with the tri-band AP7D desktop and AP7C ceiling access points (APs).

We reviewed the AP7D, and it's worth pointing out a few differences between them, as both offer 2.5GbE and 10GbE multi-gigabit ports but only the AP7C can be powered over PoE+. The AP7C presents six spatial streams equally spread across its three radios for a BE10000 rating, whereas the AP7D has eight spatial streams, with its 6GHz radio getting four of them to deliver a higher BE15000 rating.

Both devices only work with Firewalla's security appliances and don't have any routing capabilities. The main advantage of this approach is that the appliances extend Firewalla's full security stack and zero-trust features to your wireless networks.

The AP7D supports all appliance models and, for testing, we used the top-dog Gold Pro. After connecting the AP to one of its 2.5GbE ports, we used the Firewalla iOS app on an iPad to link up with the appliance.