EnGenius EAP1750H 802.11ac 3×3 Dual Band Ceiling-Mount Wireless Access Point/WDS

By Samara Lynn

Access points (APs) are to the business network what wireless routers are to the home network, adding Wi-Fi to a wired setup.There are differences of course; home routers are also generally the wired hub of your network, and access points offer far more in the way of security and network-management features. And multiple APs can be managed with a controller for centralized administration by IT. For those whose networks hew toward the no-frills side, EnGenius' EAP1750H 802.11ac 3x3 Dual Band Ceiling-Mount Wireless Access Point/WDS ($399) is speedy, if somewhat light on the enterprise features I've seen in other other APs.

Specs The EAP1750H looks like a flying saucer. It's designed to be mounted on the ceiling, and could easily be mistaken for a smoke alarm. In fact,EnGenius strives to make the device indistinguishable from other common office-building appliances.The AP ships with a T-Rail mounting kit, a ceiling wall mount and screw kit, and a mounting bracket. There's also a 12-volt power adapter, RJ-45 cable, and installation guide in the box.

You should have little problem finding a place to mount this AP, since it's fairly compact. It's 6.4 inches in diameter and 1.6 inches tall,weighing in at 9.6 ounces. On the housing are five LEDS for power, Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) activity, wireless bands, and network status. There's also a pinhole reset button on the top cover.

Thedual-band AP supports the latest wireless standard, 802.11ac at up to 450Mbps on the 2.4GHz band and up to 1300Mbps at 5GHz. You won't see those theoretical speeds in a real-world office environment, of course, particularly with the many devices that are typically connected at the 2.4GHz frequency, but the EAP1750H is still quite fast, as I'll show below.

Setup and Management Interface To set up the AP, I configured a laptop's network adapter with the same subnet as the AP. Next, I connected the RJ-45 cable from the laptop's network port to the Ethernet port on the AP. Finally, I pointed a browser to the default IP address of the AP and launched the management interface.

The management UI is bare bones; it has no graphics of any kind, just text and dropdown menus for settings. From here, you can set the device to one of three modes. You can run it as an Access Point that creates a WLAN from an existing network (the most common usage). You can put it in WDS AP mode, allowing administrators to use it as part of a Wireless Distribution System to maximize wireless coverage with other APs. The third choice is WDS Bridge mode, which lets you connect two LANs, as long as they aren't too far apart.

I used the AP operating mode. I created a WLAN and enabled both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. I noticed that for the 5GHz band, you can't set up 802.11ac-only mode. The only options are 802.11a/b, 802.11a-only, 802.11n-only, or 802.11ac/n. It isn't much of an issue, however, since many wireless clients still don't support 802.11ac. Chances are you're going to have at least some legacy hardware in your shop for years to come.

The EAP1750H has is a good mix of enterprise encryption options, including 802.1x RADIUS and WPA/WPA2 Enterprise, along with alot of common AP capabilities, including client isolation. When enabled, this disallows clients connected to the AP from communicating with one another for both security and performance reasons. Another common AP feature that the EAP1750Hpossesses is the ability to limit the number of clients that can connect to the network to prevent performance from getting bogged down.

You can also use this EnGenius AP to run a wireless scan for all other neighboring access points and use the information it returns to set the EAP1750H for use on channels that aren't packed with your neighbors' APs. This is a highly useful feature, but it's also a very common one, as are many of this AP's capabilities. It also includes VLAN support (needed for logically segmenting your wireless network for groups of users), SNMP compatibility, VPN pass-through, QoS, and MAC address filtering.

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EnGenius EAP1750H 802.11ac 3x3 Dual Band Ceiling-Mount Wireless Access Point/WDS