Why you may belief TechRadar
We spend hours testing each services or products we overview, so that you will be certain you’re shopping for one of the best. Find out more about how we test.
This overview first appeared in challenge 345 of PC Pro.
TP-Hyperlink’s EAP655-Wall is designed to supply discrete Wi-Fi 6 companies to a variety of environments, resembling assembly rooms, flats and home offices. This inexpensive palm-sized bundle may also attraction to inns trying to present in-room community companies because it has three gigabit ports in its base and might ship PoE on the third one – best for including further room gadgets resembling IP telephones.
The EAP655-Wall provides loads of options for the value. This AX3000 dual-band entry level (AP) delivers speeds of as much as 2,402Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 574Mbits/sec on the two.4GHz radio. It additionally helps the high-speed Wi-Fi 6 160MHz channels, though the AP’s principal uplink port is simply the gigabit selection so that you received’t see their full potential.
Even so, the EAP655-Wall delivered good general leads to our real-world efficiency checks. We began with its 80MHz channels enabled. Closerange copies of a big file between a Dell Windows 11 Professional workstation outfitted with a TP-Hyperlink Archer TXE75E Wi-Fi 6E PCI-E card and a server on our 10GbE LAN averaged 94MB/sec, dropping to 77MB/sec with the AP moved ten meters away and into an adjoining room.
With the AP’s 160MHz channels activated, the workstation reported a 2.4Gbits/sec wi-fi connection. Unsurprisingly, our file copies maxed out the AP’s gigabit port and solely elevated to 111MB/sec at shut vary and 91MB/sec at ten meters, though these speeds will simply be adequate for all however essentially the most demanding of customers.
The AP will be managed in standalone mode, however most businesses will choose TP-Hyperlink’s Omada cloud service as they’ll handle all their APs from one central internet portal. Beforehand, every web site required a {hardware} or software program controller put in domestically, however TP-Hyperlink now additionally provides cloud-based controllers with yearly costs beginning at £12 per gadget.
From our principal Omada cloud portal account, we seen all our {hardware}, software program and cloud-based controllers, and choosing the latter took us to its devoted administration console. Earlier than including the AP to our web site, we made certain we’d enabled the cloud-based controller administration choice from its native internet console. We might then import the AP by coming into its serial quantity, naming it and assigning a license. After adoption, entry to its native console was disabled and it began broadcasting our site-managed SSIDs.
The location portal presents an in depth dashboard that may be custom-made with widgets; we added ones to indicate particulars resembling AP visitors and shopper distributions, essentially the most energetic APs, a Wi-Fi abstract and 24-hour graphs of shopper associations and general wi-fi visitors. The AP was related to the lab’s TP-Hyperlink TL-SG3210XHP-M2 PoE+ multi-gigabit switch, and we added extra widgets to indicate its energetic ports, PoE utilization and the accessible energy price range.
Wi-fi options are intensive, with as much as eight SSIDs per radio supported and choices to use combined WPA2/WPA3 encryption. You possibly can set international or per shopper and SSID add and obtain fee limits, and use visitor networks to dam customers from non-public networks. Captive portal options are equally good, with profiles used to use a worldwide password, native consumer, voucher, Radius or Fb authentication and add logos, greeting messages and acceptable use insurance policies.
The three gigabit pass-through ports are enabled by default, and PoE companies on the third port will be activated by checking this feature within the portal’s AP configuration web page, though make sure that the principle LAN port is related to a PoE+ supply. Throughout testing, they labored high quality and after connecting a Yealink IP phone to the third port, it duly obtained energy and web entry.
It might have been good to see a 2.5GbE port, however the EAP655-Wall stays a fairly quick Wi-Fi 6 AP with an excellent vary. It provides a wealth of wireless options for a modest worth, cloud administration is great and its three gigabit downlink ports with further energy supply make it much more versatile.