We live in a wireless age, and this direction of travel is clear no matter where you look. This is typified by hardware manufacturers phasing out the trusted Ethernet port in modern razor-thin laptops and 2-in-1s. The latest Wi-Fi 6E connections, too, let us stream hundreds of megabytes a second through the air – and next year we expect to see the first Wi-Fi 7 chipsets, promising speeds of up to 40Gbits/sec.

With all this data swirling around us, traditional cabled connections may seem old-fashioned to the point of obsolescence. While Ethernet can’t match the go-anywhere convenience of wireless networking, it still has several advantages over Wi-Fi, and there are five reasons that, for many enterprise users, it will always be the superior option.

Ethernet vs Wi-Fi: Why Ethernet wins over Wi-Fi

1. Ethernet is simpler

You can’t beat Ethernet for simplicity. Just run a cable from one socket to another and boom, the connection is made. Assuming the devices at either end are correctly configured then the link speed, addressing and routing should all be sorted out automatically.

Configuring Wi-Fi, on the other hand, might be a far messier process and the complexity of this often depends on whether your physical space demands a mesh network or a Wi-Fi extender. Routing cables throughout the premises, on the other, to all terminals is a relatively more straightforward operation.

You don’t need to worry about keeping up with the latest high-end standards either: a £5 cable is all you need to get the fastest speeds. There’s no confusion about different plugs and sockets, as with USB. With the exception of high-end enterprise-grade hardware, all Ethernet links use standard RJ45 connectors, with handy plastic latches to ensure the cables can’t be accidentally yanked out.

2. Ethernet is more secure

Although the latest WPA3 wireless security protocol makes it all but impossible for an intruder to spy on your Wi-Fi connection, not all devices support it – and even if a spy can’t get into your wireless network, they can infer things from its name, signal strength, traffic patterns and so forth. That said, the forthcoming protocol might also be susceptible to future attacks, according to research published in 2020, who discovered a set of Dragonblood flaws in 2019.

With Ethernet, however, there’s no way for anyone to snoop on your data unless they can gain access to the physical cables and connectors. To succeed in an attack, a cyber criminal would need to plug a device into your network physically, while data transmitted through Wi-Fi networks are more susceptible to interception.

3. Ethernet speeds are quicker

Ethernet is almost always faster than wireless. The latest Wi-Fi routers provide high speeds over a short distance but carry your laptop into the next room and performance quickly drops off. A gigabit Ethernet connection can reliably keep up a data rate of around 100MB/sec over any length of cable, up to a huge 100 metres – and there are variants that can go far faster.

Ethernet ports on most devices use the IEEE 802.3ab standard, also known as GbE, which supports a speed of 1Gbit/sec. It doesn’t mean data transfers at that rate, though, with a gigabit Ethernet link actually conveying roughly 920Mbits/sec of usable data. That’s much better than wireless connections, though, where real-world performance rarely approaches 50% of the speed on the box. Many businesses working with big data sets and hosted applications are already using 10GbE, while data centres and supercomputing clusters have options ranging from 25GbE all the way up to 400Gbits/sec, too. Work is even underway on finalising the 800GbE and 1.6TbE standards.

Using Ethernet connections is particularly favourable if there are multiple devices located around an organisation that frequently back up to shared destinations or NAS devices. Sharing larger files between users, too, such as media or massive datasets, might be tricky over Wi-Fi if there’s a lot of activity simultaneously.

4. Ethernet connections are more reliable

Wi-Fi does allow for more convenience for those moving around a space, such as employees who frequently hot-desk or like to move between workspaces. This is particularly apparent in the age of hybrid work. Moving between sites, especially in an office set up with a mesh Wi-fi network might see the connection drop temporarily, if not properly configured. There might also be blind spots. Accessing networks at the edge, too, can be temperamental. It’s also not uncommon for a router to go down and require resetting for no initially obvious reason.

Ethernet connections, meanwhile, require people to stay in one location for continuous online access, but they provide a rock-solid, consistent connection, with only tiny variations in the data rate compared to wireless. Environmental interference is a non-issue, and you don’t normally need to worry about network congestion either. Wireless routers, on the other hand, have to divide up their bandwidth between any number of clients, every Ethernet connection represents a dedicated full-speed lane.

5. Ethernet carries lower latency

As well as higher headline speeds, Ethernet has much lower latency than wireless connections. Signals travel much faster through cables than through the air, where they’re prone to interference. On many networks, it’s common to see a higher ping time when pinging a router from a laptop connected over Wi-Fi; but for that to plummet when connecting through an Ethernet cable. Among the advantages, like smoother videoconferencing sessions, it can have a subtle effect on how snappy and responsive your system feels when you’re accessing local networked resources.

When you’re asked to think of a location without internet access, you might imagine a secluded rural area far away from the nagging email inbox that plagues your working week. What might not have come to mind is your second bedroom, home office or even dead zones in your workplace.

Businesses hoping to resolve drops in signal, or improve network coverage, might wish to explore adding either a mesh network or a Wi-Fi extender to their setup. Both systems, however, suit slightly different purposes. Whether seeking to boost the network at your home office – or your large enterprise – it’s worth considering whether mesh Wi-Fi is better than an extender, and which you should buy for your purpose.

What is a Wi-Fi extender?

A Wi-Fi extender – sometimes called a Wi-Fi repeater – takes your existing wireless signal and expands its range. Often just a plug-and-play solution, although some also have ethernet compatibility, the extender improves Wi-Fi coverage, but not necessarily speed.

Different from a mesh Wi-Fi system, where one device is, in effect, its own router (also known as a node), extenders are meant to be a cheap and simple solution to a pesky dead zone in your home or business. It’s, therefore, often suited more to home office networks than larger office buildings, although could well be useful for small businesses hoping to improve their network coverage.

What is a mesh network?

Mesh Wi-Fi systems, on the other hand, comprise a core router and a number of nodes. These nodes, which look like many home assistant devices we’re used to seeing, pave the way for quicker speeds and simpler expansion of the network.

Wi-Fi extenders in your home are not chained together like a mesh system would be. A mesh network’s devices are constantly communicating with each other, while a Wi-Fi extender is only communicating with your router.

How do these two technologies work?

At its core, a Wi-Fi extender takes the original signal from your router and sends it to places that were previously unreachable. Oftentimes, this means the extender creates its own network name rather than being integrated into something like a mesh. When you’re connecting to an extender, you’re not connecting directly to your main router. This can mean some juggling when you decide how to connect your devices.

On the other hand, a mesh system uses algorithms to communicate not just with a router, which acts as a hub, but between each node. This is how they collectively share the load as your network needs change. These mesh networks are often deployed in large public spaces like a university, office buildings or sports complexes, and are meant to provide seamless connectivity across a large space with a significant number of users. Where the extender plays the role of an amplifier, the mesh network acts like a whole orchestra.

Is a mesh network better than a Wi-Fi extender?

In terms of costs, setting up a Wi-Fi extender is cheaper, on average, than establishing a mesh network. There are fewer moving parts, it’s less of a technical exercise, and it fits into a consumer niche that demands low prices. Wi-Fi extenders also tend to be simpler to connect – sometimes with a one-button configuration or a simple app integration – but they’re less user-friendly in a large space.

Using an extender is preferable when you’re working in a small space, or connecting devices you know won’t be moving around the space much. This is because the repeater tends to appear as a separate entry in a device’s list of networks it can connect to. Users, therefore, may experience brief connectivity drops as a device switches between the different networks if it moves through the space. These aren’t issues that arise with a mesh network.

The main disadvantage of a mesh network is its price and complexity. While a repeater isn’t all that complex, a mesh network’s nodes are like a series of routers. If setting up your router gave you a headache, then setting up a mesh network might take a little bit of getting used to. Along with that complexity, however, comes an increased level of security and stability. If a Wi-Fi extender has an error – or loses connectivity – devices connected to it likely won’t be smart enough to switch back to your original router and will lose access to the internet.

Who is each of these technologies best suited for?

When it comes to deciding between a Wi-Fi extender and a mesh network, it comes down to individual needs. If you have a small dead zone in your home or business – or if you need Wi-Fi in an upstairs room – then a simple Wi-Fi extender is likely the best solution. If, however, your large business is looking for broad coverage in an expansive space – say, a warehouse or large office building – then extenders are unlikely to meet your needs.

When choosing between these two options, like with any other IT purchasing decision, it’s important not just to think of sunk costs. A key aspect of this decision is rooted in time. If you think a mesh network will be too complex and create too many concerns for your small team, then perhaps a repeater is the choice. If a repeater, however, means losing connection every time you switch which room you’re working in, a mesh system may be for you.

A business that needs a Wi-Fi network – and has both a large space and a fair amount of foot traffic – is going to be better served using a mesh network. A small company or remote worker, on the other hand, might be better served by a Wi-Fi extender. A mesh network, while it seems intimidatingly complex, offers a better user experience in spaces that put a heavy workload on their internet system. However, there’s no need to make a mountain out of a molehill if an extender will do the trick.

SMBs looking for an affordable Wi-Fi 6 network upgrade will find that the WAX615 has a lot to offer. Priced at only £138 (exc VAT), Netgear's first business AX3000 access point (AP) supports the Wi-Fi 6 high-performance 160MHz channels and comes with a 2.5GbE multi-Gigabit network port to unleash this extra speed.

The WAX615 may be cheap to buy but it doesn't compromise on features. It combines plenty of business-class features with standalone mode or cloud management and can be used to

swiftly build a meshed wireless network. Its LAN port supports PoE and PoE+ power sources, and you should use the latter if you don't want to see a drop in performance.

It also supports the Wi-Fi 6 Release 2 standard, which enables uplink MU-MIMO to deliver faster upload speeds and improves latency for delay-sensitive tasks such as video conferencing. Energy efficiency is another key feature of this standard, and the WAX615 offers an optional energy efficient mode (EEM) so it will drop from 2x2 to 1x1 MU-MIMO if no clients are connected.

It's easy to deploy the WAX615 in standalone mode, with its local web console providing a wizard that guides you through the initial setup phase. SMBs will find Netgear's Insight cloud portal more appealing, however, as it can remotely manage all wireless networks from one web console, along with Netgear's Insight-enabled NAS appliances, switches and routers.

The price includes a one-year subscription to the Insight Premium service (subsequent years cost £8.95 per device) and provides web portal plus mobile app access and support for multiple sites. You'll need to tread the Insight path if you want meshed networks, as this feature isn't available in standalone mode.

To add the WAX615 to our cloud account, we used the Insight iOS app on an iPad to scan its QR code. We then assigned the AP to our Insight organisation site and, once it was powered up and networked, it connected to our account and started broadcasting the wireless SSIDs we'd created previously.

The portal site page presents a summary of all cloud-managed Netgear devices and uses widgets so it can be easily customised to suit. Choosing the wireless option reveals all APs, more detailed traffic graphs for each radio and a list of all connected clients, along with the detected OS and traffic statistics. To create a mesh network, you can enable a global auto mode for all supported APs or set it at the device level and choose root or extender modes.

Extender APs are placed in range of a root AP and powered but not physically cabled to the same network. After we added a second WAX615 AP to our Insight account, it automatically linked up with the root AP over a 5GHz wireless connection and created a mesh with it.

To speed-test the WAX615, we hooked it up to a Zyxel XS1930-12HP 10GbE multi-gigabit PoE++ switch and connected a Dell T640 Windows server over 10GbE, giving us a test bed supporting a minimum 2.5GbE throughput. Our client system was a Dell Windows 10 Pro workstation equipped with a TP-Link Archer TX3000E Wi-Fi 6 PCI-E adapter, which employs an Intel AX200 chip supporting all Wi-Fi 6 channels.

With the AP's 80MHz channels enabled, close-range copies of a 25GB test file between the workstation and server averaged 110MB/sec. With the AP moved ten metres away from the workstation and into an adjoining room with a partition wall in the way, we saw copy speeds drop to 94MB/sec. After enabling the 160MHz channels, our workstation reported a 2.4Gbits/sec wireless connection and close-range copies averaged an impressive 179MB/sec. Increasing the connection distance to ten metres saw our file copies return a very respectable 157MB/sec.

Netgear's WAX615 combines excellent Wi-Fi 6 performance with great cloud management and delivers it all at a price that SMBs will love. It's easy to deploy and manage, while support for meshing allows businesses to expand their wireless networks easily.

Wireless networking can be a fickle beast at the best of times, which is why it’s important to ensure that your equipment is able to handle your needs. To this end, all of our wireless networking reviews include rigorous performance testing to measure the speeds, range and stability they can provide.

Wi-Fi routers and mesh systems

Our primary testing premises for standalone Wi-Fi routers and mesh systems (as opposed to business-specific APs) has a total floor area of around 90m2, split across two floors. For each router, we install the latest firmware and place the unit in a fixed location at the front of the building. For mesh systems, the second node goes at the far end of the adjacent room.

We then connect a NAS drive to the router via Ethernet and connect to it on the 5GHz band from a laptop. Next, we measure speeds by copying a series of large files to and from the NAS from five locations throughout the building.

To measure each router’s performance over both Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 5, we carry out these tests twice, first using a laptop equipped with a 160MHz Wi-Fi 6 card, and then with a 802.11ac adapter, measuring both upload and download speeds.

As ever, we need to emphasise that wireless networking speeds are affected by all sorts of environmental factors, so the absolute speeds we measure may not be replicated in your installation. However, our results give a good indication of the relative performance of each system: the products that worked best for us are highly likely to do well for you too.

Alongside performance, our reviews also take additional features and value for money into account, from which we arrive at a star rating out of five.

Business APs

Our primary testing setup for business-grade APs consists of a Windows workstation fitted with an Intel AX200 Wi-Fi 6 adapter supporting channels up to 160MHz, which we connect to the AP using 80MHz channels, and (if available) the 160MHz channels – this gives either a 1.2Gbits/sec or 2.4Gbits/sec connection speed. We’ll also use a server connected to the same network via a wired 10GbE link as a file transfer target, which prevents any unexpected bottlenecks.

To test performance, we’ll map a shared drive from the server to the PC which is connected to the AP on test. We’ll then time how long it takes to copy a 25GB test file between them over both short and longer ranges, and also using 80MHz and 160MHz channels where applicable.

We start with a short-range connection with the AP in the same room as the test PC, and then move the AP into the next room at a distance of 10 metres, including a stud wall partition between it and the PC.

You’ve signed up for internet, your installer has arrived, and now you’re faced with a box with blinking lights. Routers can come in all shapes and sizes, with different models offering varying levels of network performance and all kinds of features, from those that improve range to sharpening up network security.

Regardless of the specific router you're looking for, its role in networking is an essential one, promising unfettered access to the web. There’s more than meets the eye, though, and there are several ways your organisation can make the most of the router and unlock its potential.

How does a router work?

To explain what a router in networking is, we can suggest thinking of your business’ router as the air traffic control of your configuration, sending data packets around your network and out to the wider web.

Whether that’s interfacing between your devices and the internet, or allowing data traffic between your devices – like casting content to a television or using a server or network attached storage (NAS) device to share your data between computer – the router is at the centre of the action.

A router identifies the IP address of devices in order to know exactly where to send data that’s being distributed by a user. It’s not just about knowing which device is where on your network, but also about knowing how best to distribute that data.

For example, on routers that have two bands, usually 2.4 and 5GHz, one band may be tasked with smaller internet of things (IoT) devices, while the larger band can be assigned by the owner to devices that hog more bandwidth, like workstations.

It’s worth noting that the words modem and router are sometimes used interchangeably. A modem, the first device of its kind when computing became more accessible, allows for a single connection. It’s the front door, so to speak, between your network and the wider web.

A router, on the other hand, takes that connection and allows your network’s devices to talk to each other and do things like scanning the web for advice and guidance. In other words, in modern configurations, the two parts and functions are combined into your router.

What are the different types of routers?

First, let’s explain the difference between a wired router and wireless router. A wired model allows connections from its ports – acting more like a network switch, but does not have a way to connect wirelessly to your devices. While a wired connection, similar to the one from the ethernet jack in your wall, will be faster, it does allow for less flexibility. A wireless router allows for wireless connections and is the one we’re most familiar with. The models often provided by internet service providers (ISPs) often function as wireless routers with a couple of wired ports to boot.

From there come three key types of routers. The one we’re most familiar with, the one you’re likely to have at home, is a core router. Its job is to be the main hub for one network’s activity. If we’re stretching this analogy even further, the core router is the single staffer on the runway using batons to point your network traffic in the right direction.

That’s different from an edge router. Its job is to connect with other networks and work at the boundary of the network. Instead of being clad in a rain jacket on the tarmac, the edge router is working with its friends in the IT environment, equivalent to air traffic control. Your typical home office network won’t need an edge router, generally speaking, but in a deployment like a huge warehouse or a university campus, edge routers are needed to manage traffic across a large space or a place with a large volume of network traffic and devices.

The third main type of router is a virtual router. Rather than being a traditional physical box you might associate with the label, a virtual router is run from a more typical computer or server running specialised software. With this added flexibility, virtual routers can also run virtual private network (VPN) software, allowing you to make sure all of the traffic that runs through that router is encrypted with an extra layer of security.

What factors are important in a good router?

The first thing to consider, like any tech purchase, is what exactly you need the router to do. You don’t need to make a mountain out of a molehill and buy something that could service a massive warehouse when you’re working in a tiny office. You’ll want to make sure that it’s up to the latest standard that your devices can support – the latest being Wi-Fi-6 or Wi-Fi 6E. You also want to keep in mind what speed your network connection is. No matter how competent the router it’s only as fast as your incoming connection can put it.

As for weaknesses and pitfalls, you must keep in mind the router’s security features, most of which come thanks to its firmware. While these devices tend to automatically update, routers are susceptible to a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). This is when a network is flooded with nuisance traffic to throttle its ability to function properly. Businesses, therefore, must adequately safeguard against the potential for such attacks.

Routers also usually come with a default name and password for the administrator privileges that allow you to configure settings. Make sure you are up to date on what security features your router comes with, how you can personalise them, and whether your model is particularly vulnerable to a specific form of attack.

The last concern – and it’s one most people don’t want to talk about – is that any physical piece of hardware is prone to misuse by staff or contractors that are less-than-ethical. It’s best to ensure that checking your router’s settings and activity is part of your regular network maintenance. Don’t just, as the saying goes, set and forget.

Hearing the squeaking and squawking of a dial-up modem isn’t the only indication your network solution is out of date. Walk into any store that sells networking equipment and you’ll be confronted with two main solutions: a single router – what you see in most homes – or a mesh Wi-Fi network product.

Although mesh Wi-Fi products may seem complex, there are both advantages and disadvantages to deployment. Mesh Wi-Fi may be powerful and extend range, for instance, but it isn’t necessary for all businesses or remote workers – it depends on a variety of factors including business needs and the size of a property.

What is mesh Wi-Fi?

Mesh Wi-Fi systems are networks that operate a bit like a pyramid. Instead of your internet being supported by a single router – the Atlas of IT technology, destined to shoulder the weight of your data transfer – mesh networks rely on a series of nodes. These nodes, which are physical devices often shaped like pucks or small speakers, share that load and allow for simpler connections, easier expansion, and quicker speeds.

While some customers may choose a cheaper Wi-Fi extender to achieve the goal of expanding the coverage in a given space, most of those products can only speak to the router itself. With that constant back and forth comes a large swathe of problems, including reduced signal quality and a more difficult user experience.

Whether you need a mesh wireless networking solution is, at its core, a question of scale. However, if you can swing it, a mesh network will – generally speaking – increase your internet speed and provide a better overall user experience.

How does mesh Wi-Fi work?

From a technical point of view, these networks use what is called a mesh topology to communicate with one another. Then, algorithms are used to determine what traffic should go over which node of the network.

Two or more nodes are connected to establish the mesh Wi-Fi network, with one node connected to an internet modem and the others placed throughout the space. These nodes are all part of the same network and share the same separate service set identifier (SSID) and password, which makes scaling up or down really simple.

These nodes also handle backhaul, the task of moving data back to the initial access point to the internet (in this case, a mesh router). Large-scale installations, like at universities or for open Wi-Fi projects in cities, are usually reliant on mesh networking. The volume of traffic would not be manageable at that scale otherwise.

Why do businesses and remote workers need mesh Wi-Fi?

With more and more people working from home over the last two years, the number of properties accessing the internet has surged, with more and more people getting online too. The pandemic saw more than 700 million people come alone, according to the UN, raising the total number of internet users to 4.9 billion. In 2020, meanwhile, 92% used the internet daily, reported the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The need for internet speed may differ depending on your business, however. If you’re content with your current ethernet solution, and you don’t have a reason to upgrade, then mesh Wi-Fi networks might not make a difference. For example, if your only use of wireless networking is for customers in a small waiting room, corporate wireless mesh network might be too costly or confusing. However, if you’re a tech startup and you have hundreds of users on their phones or laptops at any one time, then a mesh Wi-Fi network might make sense.

For the remote worker, especially if you have a lot of people that you are sharing a space with, a mesh network might fit the bill. Operating a mesh network is also straightforward, with the distributed structure mitigating against outages. That’s because if one node fails, it doesn’t mean the entire network goes offline. Lastly, by default, extenders often rely on having a SSID, the name it gives itself. In practice, this means that you don’t have to switch between extenders as you move to different parts of the house. With a mesh solution, in the eyes of your device, the network is a cohesive whole.

What are the drawbacks of using mesh Wi-Fi?

While there are a number of clear advantages to mesh Wi-Fi networks, such as the capacity to increase range and the ease of scaling up networks, there are also some drawbacks.

For one, these networks are much pricier than many commonly used alternatives; you can purchase as a traditional no-mesh extender for up to £30, for example, while a mesh Wi-Fi system from a reputable brand can easily cost hundreds of pounds. Secondly, more nodes mean more devices to plug in. This means that if you have minimal power outlets, or you’re worried about your power draw, a mesh network might not be the best solution.

Lastly, it’s widely reported that mesh networks are initially more difficult to get running than your usual setup. With something like an extender, you’re often clicking a few buttons and then you’re off to the races. However, a mesh network – much like a surround speaker system – requires you to choose the optimal places around your property to put the nodes to achieve maximum coverage.

Also, with a mesh network, you’re often tied into one ecosystem, so mixing and matching brands can be difficult or near impossible. Similarly, if you choose a mesh system from a lesser-known manufacturer that could go out of business, you may be left without customer service or additional products if and when you run into issues or want to expand.

How do you secure mesh Wi-Fi networks?

While mesh networks are marketed as being more secure than their counterparts, there are some concerns you want to keep in mind when attempting to boost your network.

Each node of a mesh Wi-FI network is more akin to a computer than a regular Wi-Fi extender or repeater. With that additional capability comes the possibility of additional risk. On the plus side, many mesh offerings come from massive brands like Google and Amazon, which have protections built into the hardware and software, including elements like encryption and real-time antivirus.

Finally, If you’re the type of consumer who already trusts these techno giants with your data then you can rest a little bit easier knowing that tasks like the automatic updates you’ve set on your smartphone or tablet will be implemented within your Wi-Fi connection.

With more nodes come more physical access points, too, but in a home office setting, mesh networks are often tied into smart home solutions. If your Google Home ecosystem is also powering, say, a security camera, then your network is, in effect, working to protect itself.

My sister and her family visited me in June. As her children are approaching their teenage years and are travelling from Canada – which has terrible and expensive roaming mobile plans – the first words out of my niece and nephew wherever we went was: “What’s the Wi-Fi?”

This isn’t a dig at younger generations. They were asking because they knew their parents had already sussed it and were diligently tapping the login details into their iPhones.

This was no problem when we were in London. The capital and other well-connected cities in the UK have solid mobile coverage and decent speeds. Head to rural locales, however, and it’s like going back in time. I’m sure many readers who live in pretty, but poorly served, places are nodding along right now.

As of 2020, 190,000 UK properties were unable to get at least 10Mbits/sec, according to Ofcom, leaving the families and businesses at those locations struggling on useless connections. Also, it’s not as if 10Mbits/sec is what most of us would call speedy.

I’d rather have no internet for a week than slow, unreliable internet, and I know this because my sister and I rented a holiday house in an area called the Cotswolds Water Park. This mini Lake District two hours from London was born from the harvesting of limestone gravel; after the work was done, local streams filled up the pits. I know this because I just Googled it, and Wikipedia told me so. That was a thing I could not do while on holiday.

The internet was so slow that checking a historical fact caused tears of frustration. Load the website of the local Argos to see if they had badminton racquets in stock? It was faster to drive to the store. Place a grocery order to restock soda and candy for the kids? Again, better to get in the car. Upload a photo to Instagram or sharing one to a family WhatsApp group? Forget it, we’ll have to paint a picture with our words.

We tried a few things to make the Wi-Fi work, beginning with taking away the kids’ phones to see if they were just hitting the web too hard. That wasn’t it. My husband thought the mesh network in the house was poorly arranged, so reconfigured it. That didn’t fix it. The main router was in a closet, so he drove to the shops and bought a longer cable to bring it closer to the humans who wanted its powers, but alas, no luck.

Mobile access was no better. Remember 3G? I don’t want to, but we were lucky to get even that. Most of the time it was non-existent, too.

Plenty of you are probably thinking I should be grateful for the unwanted digital detox, and any real holiday should be offline, gallivanting outside with the kids. But this is the UK, and it rained. Stuck inside, I wanted to stream music, download movies, update games on the Nintendo Switch, refresh my Kindle library to start a new book. It isn’t like the old days either, and I can’t exactly drive to the out-of-business Blockbuster to buy a DVD when the house didn’t even have a player.

Plus, my life is online. I needed to respond to a few work emails; that was possible so long as I didn’t mind the message sitting in the outbox for a day before sending. I also needed to access my bank to pay bills, log in to Tesco to add a few key items to a grocery order, and search for what local towns were worth visiting and how to get there.

If there had been no internet access at all, we would have been better off. Our smartphones would have been useful only as cameras, and stayed in our pockets the rest of the time. I might have missed paying a bill or had to do an extra run to the shops and gotten lost on the nausea-inducing local roads, but at least I wouldn’t have stared at my phone screen, frustratingly refreshing it in the hopes that it would just load that last little bit.

I haven’t had to think about internet speeds for years. My connection at home and around town have made always-on internet as predictable as water running from my tap. My holiday in the damp bit of the Cotswolds was delightful, but it was also a reminder that so many people in this country don’t get the benefits of the online world on tap the way the rest of us do, impacting how they live and work. Nobody should have to live like that. We wouldn’t tolerate 190,000 people being forced to fill their kettles from a slow dribble. It’s time the government finally treated broadband like the utility it is.

It seems that every day we read about pollution around the world. From whales caught up on nets to particulates in the air we breathe, from water infested with everything from toxic chemicals to raw sewage. Then, there is the growing horror of microplastics, which are small chunks of plastic officially defined as being smaller than 5mm in diameter. Now, I read microplastics are being found inside living creatures.

The pollution problem is getting worse in the world of computing and the internet, too, except here it’s mostly related to a tidal wave of advertising material. Some of it is obvious, with websites that are often more advert than content a particular bête noir of mine. Other adverts are more insidious, such as those injected into video streams on YouTube. I understand the need for advertising revenue, and that I can pay the monthly YouTube fee to get rid of the inserted adverts, but this doesn’t rid me of the almost endless product placements made within the video itself.

Then, there’s my hatred of the inline feed adverts on Facebook, which has reached the level of almost a nervous tick. I have a morbid fascination with hitting the “block advert” button on the iOS app, then flagging the advert as “irrelevant” and then blocking the advertiser, which can eventually make the Facebook advertising algorithm back off for a few weeks. On desktop browsers, Social Fixer strips the feed of much unwanted rubbish, but Social Fixer and Facebook appear locked in an endless game of cat and mouse as Facebook tries new methods of getting around the filtering.

It doesn’t stop there, of course – buy a new computer and you can rest assured there’s a wheelbarrow full of rubbish to be immediately uninstalled, starting with the ubiquitous antivirus trialware. I strip laptops back to the bare minimum, keeping only necessary vendor-supplied tools for updating firmware and drivers.

So, you can imagine my horror at reading reports that a company, Glance, is about to launch its lockscreen tool for Android phones in the USA. It replaces the standard lock screen with its own platform and, as you can probably expect, this means adverts can be delivered directly to this screen. Although the company insists that it isn’t an ads platform but a “smart surface”.

“In the US, monetisation on the lock screen surface will be primarily driven by the Space that a consumer chooses to consume at any moment,” its blog says. “For example, consumers can pay a subscription fee for premium news wraps by a major publisher arriving every morning on their lock screens; or, they could choose to buy products from merchants when the product drop of the day surfaces on the lock screen.”

Time will tell how Glance works in the US – and you can expect the UK won’t be far behind – but my suspicion is that Glance-enabled phones will be supplied by telcos for a slightly lower fee, much as Amazon offers a discount on some Kindles.

Adverts have their place, but only if there is a clear understanding that the costs to the end-user are reduced, often to zero, by accepting the adverts. That requires a clear understanding that you either get the adverts, or you can pay a small subscription and get the clean feed. However, no one wants to engage in that discussion, mostly because it requires them to put a value on the advertising feed, and thus onto the end user uptake.

If I find a site or platform that offers a paid-for subscription, I will usually try it for a period. If I find the feed still laden with adverts, of whatever sort, then I will back away and have few qualms about applying technology to get the feed in a form that I want.

It really is about time that there was clarity in this space. Buy a laptop with all the crapware installed and pay a price. Pay slightly more and get it without. Then I can choose, based on the cost of my time, to clean things up.

At the same time, we need to talk about online advertising and its place in our lives. And this is before we even get onto the enormous amount of user profiling that is happening in real-time of each and every internet user, and the question of where and how that data is being used.

I absolutely would not buy a smartphone that had built-in advertising of the form provided by Glance. Telcos have no right into my phone operation other than providing raw connectivity.

It is no longer acceptable to just sit back and assume that we’re going to get swamped, and that there is nothing we can do about it. All that will happen is the pollution will grow and mutate until, like microplastics, it’s so pervasive that we can’t even spot it anymore. It's just there, inside our devices. It’s time we put these companies back into their box.

SMBs that want an affordable and compact Wi-Fi 6 access point (AP) with an emphasis on speed will appreciate TP-Link’s Omada EAP650. Costing only £139, this slimline ceiling-mount AP isn’t much larger than a smoke detector and yet combines a fast AX3000 rating with support for the Wi-Fi 6 high-performance 160MHz channels.

The EAP650 delivers speeds of up to 2,402Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 574Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz one. Its single LAN port supports PoE+, but if you don’t have an available power source, the box includes an external PSU as well. The only catch is that the port is the Gigabit variety, so you won’t see the full potential of the 160MHz channels.

On the plus side, the EAP650 teams up plenty of business-class features with two management choices. You can use it in standalone mode, but most businesses will prefer TP-Link’s Omada cloud service, as they can manage multiple sites, all associated APs and other Omada-enabled switches and routers from one web portal. Each site requires an Omada cloud controller, and TP-Link offers free software versions for Windows and Linux that support up to 1,500 managed devices.

For testing, we used the lab’s OC300 hardware appliance, which runs the Linux controller version, supports 700 devices and costs around £100. For the complete Omada experience, we added TP-Link’s TL-R605 broadband router, which costs £40 and powered the EAP650 with a TL-SG3210XHP-M2 PoE+ multi-gigabit switch, which adds £286 to the bill.

Once the EAP650 was powered and connected, it appeared in our cloud portal as “pending” and, when it was adopted, it pulled all its settings from the controller and broadcast our predefined site SSIDs. You can create the same number of SSIDs as in standalone mode – up to eight per radio – and apply mixed mode WPA2/WPA3 encryption, rate limits and load balancing.

The portal brings meshing into play, where a wired AP functions as the root and other compliant APs connect to it using their 5GHz radio as a backhaul. You can spread your wireless network far and wide, as mesh APs can connect to other nodes with up to three hops between them and the root AP.

To test meshing, we placed a TP-Link EAP620 HD near to the EAP650 with power provided but no wired network connection. It appeared in the portal as pending, with an extra icon showing a wireless link to the root AP, and adopting it instantly created a mesh network allowing users to roam seamlessly across all member APs.

The cloud portal also delivers classy captive portal features for managing guest wireless access. Authentication methods include password, local user, voucher, Radius, Facebook or SMS using the paid-for service, plus you can add your own background pictures and brand logos, enforce acceptable use policies (AUPs), cycle through up to five advertising images and present PC and mobile-friendly portal versions.

For our real-world performance tests, we used a Dell Windows 10 Pro workstation equipped with a TP-Link Archer TX3000E Wi-Fi 6 PCI-E adapter, which employs an Intel AX200 chip supporting all Wi-Fi 6 channels. With the AP’s 80MHz channels enabled from the cloud portal, close-range copies of a 25GB test file between the workstation and a server on our 10GbE LAN averaged an impressive 109MB/sec. This dipped to 97MB/sec with the AP ten metres away.

With the AP’s 160MHz channels activated, the workstation reported a 2.4Gbits/sec wireless connection. Unsurprisingly, our file copies maxed out the AP’s gigabit port and only increased to 113MB/sec at close range and 111MB/sec at ten metres.

It’s a shame the EAP650 isn’t endowed with a 2.5GbE LAN port, but it still delivers impressive performance over Gigabit that will satisfy all but the most demanding of environments. It offers plenty of wireless features, including meshing, all easily managed from the Omada cloud portal, and for an AX3000-rated Wi-Fi 6 AP, it’s great value as well.

TP-Link Omada EAP650 specifications

If you’re thinking you’ve seen these miniature towers somewhere before, you’re right: despite the new name, Linksys’ latest Wi-Fi 6 mesh is an evolution of its long-established Velop system.

Unlike the original Velop, the Atlas Pro 6 is a dual-band design, operating a traditional 2.4GHz wireless network plus a faster 5GHz network. As there’s no third radio, the 5GHz channel ferries both backhaul and client data back and forth, a compromise that helps keep the price down.

The units are tastefully designed, with square tops that gently round out towards the base. They’re dinkier than you might expect, standing 185mm tall with an 85 x 85mm footprint, but they have quite some range: Linksys claims the three-unit set can cover an area of up to 750m2, which is far larger than the average UK home. For three rooms or fewer you can make do with a twin-pack, which also saves a handy chunk of cash. You can also connect a decent number of wired clients – you’ll find four Gigabit Ethernet ports stacked up at the back of each unit.

Setup is handled by the Linksys mobile app, which detected our first node almost instantly and guided us through picking our network name and security settings. Once your Atlas system is running, you can use the app to check on connected clients and carry out basic management tasks, such as configuring port forwarding and nominating up to three high-priority devices – handy for home working. Parental controls are offered too, though these are minimal: if you want to block unsavoury websites, you have to enter each one’s URL by hand.

If you prefer not to be tied to an app, you can manage the Atlas Pro 6 from a desktop browser; in fact, this is the only way to access a few options, such as giving different names to the 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks. However, Linksys’ ageing Smart Wi-Fi console is slow and fiddly, and is laid out completely differently to the app. And no matter which interface you use, there’s no support for VPNs, nor any security functions.

We’ve already noted that dual-band meshes require the 5GHz radio to do double duty, and this inescapably reduces the effective bandwidth of the system. To its credit, Linksys has done what it can to keep things moving swiftly. The Atlas Pro 6’s 5GHz radio is as fast as you’ll find on any domestic router, using the maximum 160MHz channel width and supporting transfer speeds of up to 4.8Gbits/sec with 4x4 MU-MIMO. The system also uses the latest Qualcomm 216 wireless chipset; the import of that might not be immediately obvious, but – as we’ve seen with the TP-Link Deco X90 – the newest Wi-Fi 6 chips deliver a striking uplift in wireless performance compared to the previous generation.

To see how all this translates to real-world performance, we set up the three Atlas Pro 6 stations in our test premises, situating the nodes throughout the building. We connected an Asustor NAS appliance to the main Atlas station via Gigabit Ethernet, and used a laptop to copy a set of 100MB files to and from the NAS from various parts of the building, measuring upload and download speeds over the 5GHz network.

The results were very creditable. Predictably, the Atlas Pro 6 didn’t match the headline speeds of pricier tri-band systems, but it gave us a strong download speed of 60.2MB/sec at short range. That’s just over 480Mbits/sec, well beyond the full speed of a typical domestic internet connection; for context, 25Mbits/sec should be sufficient for 4K HDR streaming.

We were just as pleased by the performance we saw in other rooms. With older meshes we’ve sometimes seen a big drop-off in speed away from the primary unit, as the connection switches to one of the extender nodes. But even in the hard-to-reach area at the back of the building, the Atlas Pro 6 kept up a solid 44MB/sec – enough bandwidth for a rock-solid online experience, whether you’re gaming, streaming or working from home.

What’s particularly striking about the Atlas Pro 6 is that it performs better than many tri-band systems. That includes our former top pick, the Netgear Orbi RBK752: while upload speeds were similar across the two systems, the Atlas Pro 6 provided faster downloads in every test.

Let’s not get carried away. The Atlas Pro 6 couldn’t keep up with the TP-Link Deco X90 anywhere in our test location, its software isn’t as slick and it also lacks the Deco’s multi-gig Ethernet support. However, the Atlas is more than fast enough to race through typical networking tasks, and the versatile three-node package gives you the freedom to extend coverage where you need it. For most small premises, there’s little sense in spending more.

Linksys Atlas Pro 6 specifications

Some mesh systems focus on high-end performance, others prioritise affordability. The Deco X90 finds its own balance: it’s hardly a budget system, but it’s competitively priced considering it promises to deliver Wi-Fi 6 for up to 200 devices, throughout a home of up to six bedrooms.

Despite those ambitious claims, the kit contains only two stations. They’re not much to look at, but they’re tasteful, with a single status LED near the base of each one. If you need to extend the system’s footprint, an additional unit costs £245. The X90 doesn’t support Wi-Fi 6E, but it works so well over regular Wi-Fi 6 that may not matter.

It’s a regular tri-band design, with each unit containing a legacy 2.4GHz radio plus two independent 5GHz transmitters, ensuring that the client network doesn’t get bogged down with backhaul traffic. The backhaul connection is rated at a comparatively slow 1.2Gbits/sec, while the main network runs at up to 4.8Gbits/sec. However, the backhaul can borrow bandwidth from the primary network when needed, allowing the system to dynamically adapt to demand.

Both stations are also equipped with a 2.5Gbits/sec Ethernet socket, as well as an ordinary gigabit connector. It’s great to have this ultra-high-speed option, although a few more sockets would be welcome, especially since one of the ports on the primary unit is needed for your internet connection. Still, if you want to hook up several wired devices, a five-port 2.5GbE switch costs less than £100.

Setting up and managing the Deco X90 means installing the smartphone app, as the web console shows only basic information about your network. The app is easy to get on with, and provides basic settings such as IP address reservation, port forwarding and guest network control. In some areas the Deco isn’t as configurable as rival meshes from Asus or Netgear: you can turn the 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks on and off independently, but you can’t tweak the automatically selected frequency settings, and there’s no support for VPN connections, either incoming or outgoing.

On the plus side, network security and parental controls are on hand courtesy of TP-Link’s HomeShield. Although the full feature set requires an annual subscription, the free tools are pleasingly usable, allowing you to carry out on-demand network scans, apply category-based website filtering and set a simple access schedule for kids. Subscribing to the Pro package for £54 a year unlocks proactive security scanning, more flexible access controls for individual devices and extensive reporting.

For smart home fans, the Deco app doubles up as an IoT control centre. One-tap actions and automatic triggers let you control smart lights and switches from brands including Philips Hue, Samsung SmartThings and TP-Link’s own Kasa series.

While these are decent features to have, they’re the same as cheaper Deco systems, such as the £270 Deco X20. What sets the X90 apart is performance. To test this, we set up the system in our test premises, with the main unit at one end and the secondary one at the opposite end of the adjoining room. We connected an Asustor Drivestor 4 Pro NAS to the 2.5GbE socket of the primary Deco unit, carried a laptop to various places in the building, and measured file-copy speeds to and from the NAS.

The results were striking, to say the least. When the Netgear Orbi RBK752 arrived last year, its close-range download speeds of nearly 60MB/sec seriously impressed us. This time, the Deco X90 blew that away with a phenomenal same-room rate of 148MB/sec. That’s the fastest performance we’ve seen from any mesh, even beating the £1,500 Orbi RBKE963, which peaked at 118MB/sec over a Wi-Fi 6E connection.

The Deco X90 isn’t only fast up close. Performance predictably dropped off once we moved into other rooms, but no matter where we wandered, it consistently delivered download speeds between 60 and 70MB/sec. Indeed, the slowest speed we saw anywhere from the X90 (62MB/sec) was higher than the fastest speed the RBK752 ever managed to muster, even when our laptop was sitting mere metres from the transmitter.

The Deco X90 didn’t take the crown in all our tests. The Orbi RBKE963’s Wi-Fi 6E support allowed it to top 70MB/sec at long range when downloading to a 6E client. That system costs three times as much, though, so you’d expect it to have an advantage: it’s only surprising that the gap wasn’t larger.

By comparison, for what you get the Deco X90 is remarkably affordable. For those on a moderate budget the Linksys Atlas Pro 6 is cheaper, but if you demand high speeds and wide coverage then the Deco X90 is an obvious choice. Far faster than the older generation of Wi-Fi 6 meshes, yet much cheaper than the incoming wave of 6E hardware, it hits a winning sweet spot that no other system has managed to locate.

TP-Link Deco X90 specifications

Printers have been at the heart of the office, and home office, for many years now, and they've evolved significantly in that time. In previous years, you'd need to ensure multiple cables were connected before you could print: one to the power source, a cable to the computer itself, or for an older network-powered printer, an ethernet cable directly into the router. Thankfully, the advent of wireless printing has streamlined things significantly since then.

The question of how a wireless printer works can be answered in a multitude of ways because there are so many different technologies that facilitate wireless printing. Indeed, the wireless technology shift brought printers with it too, and being able to send files, photos, and other documents across the network to the printer itself made the task much easier for pretty much everyone who has ever needed to print anything.

No two configurations are the same, though, and the wireless technologies that allow users to print documents wherever there is a network can differ depending on the manufacturers of the printer and device from which you want to print. Some technologies like Apple’s AirPrint are only available on certain models of printer, so it’s worthwhile understanding your printing needs and wants before making the final decision to purchase the best wireless printer for your business.

What is a wireless printer?

Wireless printers are somewhat self-explanatory, in that they are printers that allow users to print documents without actually having to physically link a computer to the printer itself. These are sometimes known as Wi-Fi printers because it’s common, especially in corporate offices, to use Wi-Fi as the wireless technology through which documents are sent to the printer.

Many offices, libraries, schools, and other shared workspaces will often have one or two printers on each floor of the building. No matter where a user is in the building, they will be able to select their nearest printer and send the documents they need to it, as long as they are connected to the same Wi-Fi network as the printer.

It’s a highly convenient way of allowing large groups of people to print from the same device. It also means workers in a busy office won’t have to fight over USB cables, awkwardly holding a laptop, for example, within the cable’s reaching distance while waiting for the documents to print.

The best printers, often found in industrial offices, often come equipped with touchscreen user interfaces (UIs) and ship with technology that prevents employees from printing others’ work. They can be accessed by wireless keycards with a tap, other kinds of access fobs, or sometimes just a normal password.

How do wireless printers work?

How each wireless printer works will, of course, vary between models and manufacturers, but the underlying principles remain largely the same across the board. Typically, a wireless printer will need to be paired to the target Wi-Fi network. This is the most common technology used to print wirelessly, although there are others.

Many offices use multiple wireless networks and reserve some networks for certain functions, so it’s important to connect printers to the network that the staff use day-to-day - that includes being on the same network frequency, too. Setup may also require users to install drivers or software on their individual machines, but this is relatively easy and quick to do; the manufacturer should provide instructions on how to do this, if necessary.

From there (and if installed correctly), the printer should appear in every printing window a user brings up. For example, pressing Ctrl + P on Windows, or CMD + P on macOS, are the usual keyboard shortcuts to print from whatever application a user is running. Among the numerous options that appear in the resulting window, the printer may appear in a dropdown list marked Destination or similar. In other cases, printers may appear as different icons in a graphical user interface (GUI), like how folders can be viewed as small, medium, and large icons in Windows File Explorer, for example.

After the correct printer is selected and all other settings are tailored to the printing project at hand, then all that’s left to do is click Print and the documents should be sent over the Wi-Fi network and received by the printer. The wireless printer may print the documents immediately, or send them to a queue.

Printing queues are common in offices and prevent unauthorised staff from viewing certain documents. It also prevents people from accidentally taking printed work that isn’t theirs away from the printer. In these cases, the company should set the users up with a way of accessing the printing queue, usually done via a password or wireless keycard. From there, the user selects their print job and ‘releases’ it from the queue, starting the actual printing process.

If using Wi-Fi in a large building, ensure the printer is placed in a convenient location for all users, and most importantly, placed in a location that allows it to receive a strong Wi-Fi signal because, without one, there will be no wireless printing.

Other types of wireless printing

Wi-Fi is the most common wireless standard over which wireless printing is carried out, but other technologies exist that may be even fast and more convenient for any given user or business.

Bluetooth printers exist and can be used by a multitude of devices to print documents, much like how Wi-Fi-enabled devices can. The downside to Bluetooth is that the maximum range is likely to be considerably shorter than Wi-Fi, making it a sub-optimal choice and potentially an entirely unworkable one for large offices.

Near-field communication (NFC) can also be used to connect a device to a printer directly, requiring just a tap between the two devices. The process should be familiar as it’s the same technology that’s used in modern smartphones to accomplish phone-based payments. This can be convenient in some use cases but in most professional settings it will be difficult and laborious to haul a laptop over to a printer, somewhat eliminating the wireless benefit of printing.

Cloud printing is also a fast-growing possibility and if the user or business takes the time to link compatible services with compatible printers, it can be a big time-saver. Some large tech and cloud companies now have dedicated print services so instead of printing over a direct Wi-Fi connection to the wireless printer, the user can send a printing job to a cloud printing service - usually linked to an account with whatever company is offering the service - which then sends it to the wireless printer. This can be useful in some use cases, but Wi-Fi is most likely the best choice for most.

Despite the fact that development on the new Wi-Fi 7 standard is already well underway, Wi-Fi 6E equipment is still comparatively rare. Netgear’s first standalone Wi-Fi 6E router is the eye-catching Nighthawk RAXE500, bringing the new technology into a single package and reducing the cost to a (relatively) manageable level.

To recap, Wi-Fi 6E introduces a new set of wireless channels in the 6GHz frequency range. These can be used to evade interference from older networks, allowing for a clearer, faster connection; the catch is that in order to take advantage, both the router and clients need the latest 6GHz-compatible hardware.

The Netgear Nighthawk RAXE500 thus integrates separate transceivers for the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz radio bands, making it a tri-band router in the truest sense. They’re all top-of-the-range units – even the lowly 2.4GHz band is rated for up to 1.2Gbits/sec, while the others promise transfer speeds of a huge 4.8Gbits/sec – which partly explains the price.

With its upturned wings, the Nighthawk RAXE500 looks markedly similar to its predecessor, the top-quality Nighthawk RAX80. The only real clue that we’re looking at a generational upgrade is round the back, where the usual four gigabit LAN ports are joined by a 2.5Gbits/sec Ethernet connector, hinting at an uplift in performance potential.

While it’s good to see multi-gigabit Ethernet appearing on domestic gear, we wish Netgear had provided more than a single port: as things stand, if you want two wired clients talking to one another at full 2.5Gbits/sec speeds, you’ll need to shell out for an external 2.5Gbits/sec switch. However, two of the regular LAN ports can be aggregated together to make an additional 2Gbits/sec connection, and it’s also possible to combine another socket with the gigabit WAN port to accommodate a multi-gigabit broadband connection.

A brace of USB 3 ports is provided too, which you can use to connect external storage for lightweight NAS duties. These only support the baseline 5Gbits/sec transfer speed, but that’s fast enough to saturate any individual network connection.

The recommended way to set up the RAXE500 is from your phone, using Netgear’s Nighthawk app. This walks you quickly through basic stuff such as picking a secure admin password and optionally setting a custom network name and passphrase. The app can also be very helpful in working out where best to locate your router and how to get the strongest connection, as it includes a Wi-Fi Analytics module that measures your signal strength and scans for other networks in range.

If you want to tweak your wireless settings, however, you’ll need to open the web console. This is where all serious configuration is carried out, including choosing whether your 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz networks will all be combined under a single name, or broadcast separately to give you full control over what connects on which band.

The expected network management features are here too, allowing you to choose DHCP settings, reserve addresses and set up port forwarding for individual devices. As usual, Netgear includes an OpenVPN server that you can use to access your home network over the internet – a classy touch that few other router manufacturers match. Sadly, there’s no outbound VPN support, so you can’t easily tunnel all of your traffic through a secure server.

Another thing that’s conspicuously missing is parental controls. This is usual for Netgear’s Nighthawk routers, but rather baffling since the Orbi platform has a perfectly good set of controls that could surely be transplanted without much difficulty. Still, the RAXE500 does get the Netgear Armor feature, which provides network-wide malware detection, remotely scans connected devices for vulnerabilities and automatically blocks suspicious connections.

Be warned, though, that Armor is a paid-for extra: the first year of service costs £38, after which the price shoots up to £85 per year. Being asked to pay a steep subscription on top of the price of the router leaves a sour taste in the mouth, but the service does include a licence to install the local Bitdefender Security software on all of your computers and mobile devices, so for a big household it could be a decent deal.

We know that, theoretically, the switch to 6GHz can make a big difference to performance. The question is, can a standalone router deliver a big enough speed boost, over a wide enough range, to justify the upgrade?

To find out, we set up the RAXE500 in our test location and connected an Asustor Drivestor 4 Pro NAS appliance to its 2.5GbE socket. We then carried a laptop equipped with an Intel AX210 Wi-Fi 6E card to various rooms and measured how long it took to copy a standard set of 100MB files to and from a shared folder on the NAS. We did this twice, to test both 5GHz and 6GHz performance, and you can see the results in the gallery below, along with results from the same tests for the Orbi WiFi 6E (over a 6GHz connection) and the 5GHz-only Nighthawk RAX80.

At short range, the RAXE500 is an awesome performer, racking up close-range download speeds of 152MB/sec on the 6GHz band, and 127MB/sec on a 5GHz connection. Its same-room and next-room downloads on the 6GHz band were the fastest we’ve seen over any type of wireless connection, easily beating the RAX80’s comparatively paltry 60MB/sec. It’s a good job we used a 2.5GbE connection to the NAS, as a regular gigabit line wouldn’t have been fast enough to keep up with the Wi-Fi.

Perhaps even more impressive is what the RAXE500 managed to do over a 5GHz connection. The Nighthawk RAX80 – until recently the king of the router scene – was almost completely overshadowed as the RAXE500 almost doubled its download performance in multiple rooms. Its top speeds even outpaced Netgear’s £1,500 Orbi Wi-fi 6E system.

Unsurprisingly, the RAXE500’s advantage fell away as we wandered further from the router; in the most distant locations, the benefit of a mesh system was plain to see. Yet the RAXE500 still did astonishingly well, with download speeds in these rooms topping 60MB/sec. Its weakest score was at the far end of the property, and even here it kept up a solid 16.6MB/sec on the 6GHz band, fast enough to enjoy the full speed of a 100Mbits/sec fibre broadband connection. Long-range performance was slightly stronger on the 5GHz network, probably because lower-frequency radio waves are better able to penetrate walls and other obstacles.

Until recently, the only way to get Wi-Fi 6E was by spending a grand and a half on the Orbi WiFi 6E. Next to that, the Nighthawk RAXE500 looks reasonably priced. And since it provides such strong performance with 5GHz clients, this isn’t a situation where you need to replace all your devices with brand-new 6E-compatible ones to get any benefit.

Even so, the RAXE500 is a sizeable investment, and one that only makes sense if you regularly move very large amounts of data wirelessly. Otherwise there’s no end of cheaper 5GHz routers that are more than fast enough for everyday internet duties and lightweight file sharing: Asus’ RT-AX82U ticks a lot of boxes for £174, while D-Link and Honor offer perfectly decent home routers for less than £100.

That’s not to say the Nighthawk RAXE500 is overpriced. If you can find the money it’s a truly exceptional performer that maximises the potential of Wi-Fi 6, and showcases the additional power of 6E. For most people, however, it’s probably wisest to sit tight. No doubt in the coming year we’ll see a procession of Wi-Fi 6E routers at more competitive prices; but we’ll be surprised if we see a better one.

Netgear Nighthawk RAXE500 specifications

As a member of Zyxel’s Extreme family of Wi-Fi 6 business access points (APs), the WAX610D has a sharp focus on wireless performance. It looks to have the right credentials: this AC3000 dual-band AP supports speeds of up to 2,400Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 575Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz radio.

A feature that adds extra appeal is Zyxel’s latest firmware upgrade, which enables support for the Wi-Fi 6 high-performance 160MHz channels. And unlike Ubiqiuiti’s U6-LR AP, which only has a Gigabit network port, the WAX610D can realise these higher speeds through its faster 2.5GbE multi-gigabit PoE+ port.

The WAX610D is solidly built and incorporates power surge protection, integral 4G/5G interference filters and internal smart aerials. The latter make it very accommodating for physical placement as the dual-optimised antennas allow it to be set for ceiling or wall mounting.

Triple-choice management is on the cards, too, as the WAX610D can function as a standalone AP, team up with Zyxel’s on-premises NXC controller appliances or be managed via the cloud using Zyxel’s Nebula Control Center (NCC) platform. The price includes a one-year NCC Professional Pack licence, which enables extra features such as email alerting, scheduled firmware updates and a rolling one-year log retention service (the Base Pack keeps only 24 hours of logs).

The WAX610D is easy to deploy in standalone mode, with its web console wizard guiding us through setting the country of operation and changing the default admin password. One SSID on each radio is enabled, but their default encryption keys should be changed immediately as they are easy to guess.

Further wireless settings are configured using profiles and objects, with both radios capable of broadcasting up to eight SSIDs. Each one can be assigned their own profile, with options for strong WPA3 encryption, QoS (quality of service) for prioritising voice or video traffic and custom upload and download rate limits.

Moving to NCC cloud management is equally undemanding. We used Zyxel’s Nebula app on an iPad to scan the AP’s QR code printed on the label underneath. We added it to our site with one tap, after which it rebooted, disabled its local interface and presented our cloud-defined SSIDs.

The Nebula home page presents a customisable dashboard showing total wireless traffic, APs by usage and all connected wireless clients along with their detected OS. Up to eight SSIDs per site can be created, with each one assigned their own encryption scheme along with upload and download bandwidth restrictions, a guest wireless network with captive portal, L2 isolation and a walled garden.

To speed-test the WAX610D, we hooked it up to a Zyxel XS1930-12HP 10GbE multi-gigabit PoE++ switch and connected a Dell T640 Windows server over 10GbE giving us a test bed supporting a minimum 2.5GbE throughput. Our client system was a Dell Windows 10 Pro workstation equipped with a TP-Link Archer TX3000E Wi-Fi 6 PCI-E adapter, which employs an Intel AX200 chip supporting all Wi-Fi 6 channels.

Starting with the 80MHz channels enabled on the WAX610D, close-range copies of a 25GB test file between the workstation and server averaged an impressive 107MB/sec. Moving the AP ten metres away from the workstation and into an adjoining room with a partition wall in the way saw copy speeds drop to 94MB/sec.

With the AP’s 160MHz channels turned on from the NCC console, the workstation reported a 2.4Gbits/sec wireless connection and our close-range copy test returned an amazing 180MB/sec. The good news continued with the AP placed ten metres away, as our copies mustered a very creditable 159MB/sec.

There are plenty of cheaper business-class Wi-Fi 6 APs but SMBs willing to pay a premium will love the WAX610D as it leaves the rest in the dust for performance. Support for the 160MHz channels delivers a big speed boost to clients that support it, it’s easy to deploy, and the NCC platform offers classy cloud management features.

Zyxel WAX610D Unified Pro Access Point specifications

Under a new proposal by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, the minimum broadband speeds in America would be raised to 100 Mbits/sec down and 20 Mbits/sec up.

Rosenworcel's Notice of Inquiry raises the issue to her colleagues and will need to be voted on down the line. In 2015, the FCC set the minimum speeds required for an internet service to be considered ‘broadband’ at 25 Mbits/sec down and 3 Mbits/sec up. Internet service providers (ISPs) are currently required to meet these speeds to sell a service as ‘broadband’.

Under Rosenworcel’s predecessor Ajit Pai, the FCC declined to further raise the required speeds. This is despite the increased demand for internet services for working from home and the availability of services such as 4k streaming. Rosenworcel's Notice of Inquiry also proposes a goal of a minimum 1 Gbps/500 Mbits/sec for the future of American internet infrastructure.

If the changes went ahead, ISPs such as Comcast and Verizon might be forced to change pricing to fit the mandated speeds into their packages.

Last year, AT&T executive vice president Joan Marsh criticised proposals to subsidise rollout of fibre to homes and small businesses as unnecessary, stating in a blog post:

“There would be significant additional cost to deploy fiber to virtually every home and small business in the country when at present there is no compelling evidence that those expenditures are justified over the service quality of a 50/10 or 100/20 Mbps product.”

On the likelihood of price increases, Marsh highlighted the “consumer cost challenge” of providing fibre broadband to rural areas at an FCC estimated cost of $100 per month.

“Even the increased Emergency Broadband Fund $50 subsidy will deliver a low-income household less than half of the support it would need to fund such a high-speed service.

“As higher speed networks get deployed to rural America, the current availability challenge could easily become an affordability one.”

A 2021 report by the Government Accountability Office found that current broadband speeds are insufficient to support small businesses, raising the possibility of broadband speed increases to provide support for companies that do not have access to the high speeds enjoyed by larger corporations based in or near major cities.

The report further cites data from the National Federation of Independent Business and from Google to highlight that 8% (2 to 3 million) of small businesses in the US lack access to broadband entirely.

The Biden administration reached an agreement with 20 broadband providers in May to improve internet speeds or cut prices of existing broadband packages to improve broadband access. The move comes as part of the wider Internet for All initiative, a $45 billion plan to expand high-speed broadband connectivity currently in the early stages of deployment.

Last year's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) had been earmarked to provide nearly $10 billion to ISPs via reverse auction to expand internet access in rural areas. Shortly into the bidding process, however, the FCC called the legitimacy of some companies into question.

Expanding high-speed broadband to all Americans would also impact the business model of companies such as SpaceX.

Through their service Starlink, the spacecraft manufacturer and satellite communications company currently provides internet access to tens of thousands of customers in the United States, with a specific goal to give those in remote wilderness areas internet at speeds around 50-250 Mbits/sec down.

The consistency of wired internet versus the frequent outages suffered by satellite internet services could drive rural customers away from Starlink if they were offered a viable, high-speed internet package from a traditional provider.

On the surface, the EnGenius ECW220S looks like a standard business Wi-Fi 6 access point (AP), but what lies beneath makes it a bit special: it has not two, but three radios. Along with the 2.4GHz and 5GHz variety, the ECW220S has a dedicated wireless intrusion detection system (WIDS) radio for sniffing out wireless security threats and bringing them to your attention.

Collectively grouped under the AirGuard banner, the ECW220S can detect rogue APs, evil twins, misuse of valid SSIDs, man-in-the-middle attacks, RF jamming and de-authentication. And if that’s not enough, it even has a Bluetooth low energy (BLE) sensor for detecting nearby Bluetooth client devices.

You don’t need to be a wireless wizard to use AirGuard, thanks to its easy management from the EnGenius cloud portal. It took only a few seconds to add the ECW220S to our cloud account by using the Cloud To-Go iOS app on an iPad to scan in the QR code on its base.

Once registered to our site, the ECW220S received its predefined wireless settings and started broadcasting them. Up to eight SSIDs per site are supported and, for each one, you can decide which radios are active, enforce WPA3 encryption and enable application analysis.

The portal’s dashboard displays all cloud-managed switches and APs, along with a graph of wireless throughput for up to a month and doughnut charts for the top APs, clients and SSIDs. Below is a traffic analysis graph showing the top ten detected applications and their upload and download bandwidth usage.

AirGuard is accessed from the same management menu as the dashboard and is enabled with one click, although you should choose a convenient time to do this as all wireless clients will be briefly booted off the network. Once activated, the ECW220S scans the airwaves, reports back on all detected SSIDs and places them in the portal’s “Other SSIDs” list if it considers them to be non-threatening.

The scanning radio has a long reach and revealed 39 SSIDs near our location, even spotting an internet-enabled Samsung washing machine. Custom rules automatically classify SSIDs so any that match their keywords will be placed in the portal’s rogue AP list, while white list rules ensure your own SSIDs don’t get wrongly classified.

We tested AirGuard’s automatic rogue detection by connecting a Netgear AP to the lab network configured with the same SSID as our site account. When it came online, AirGuard spotted it, placed it straight in its rogue AP list and posted an alert in the mobile app. AirGuard won’t stop rogue APs from being used, however, as it doesn’t currently offer containment services.

The portal’s wireless client page has an extra tab for Bluetooth, and in only five minutes it had detected ten client devices and listed their MAC addresses. Some we identified as our own but others that kept popping up briefly we suspected were members of the public walking past our office with Bluetooth-enabled mobiles.

As a standard business AP, the ECW220S has a lot to offer. It can present captive portals with a range of authentication methods, while a client timeline shows which SSIDs they’re associated with. Along with AirGuard, these features require a paid-for Pro cloud account. The ECW220S includes the first year free, after which it costs around £38 per year for each device.

It’s no slouch in the Wi-Fi 6 performance stakes, either. Large file copies between a Windows 10 Pro workstation equipped with a TP-Link Archer TX3000E Wi-Fi 6 PCI-E adapter and a server on our 10GbE LAN averaged 102MB/sec at close range, dropping to 85MB/sec with the AP moved ten metres away and into the next room.

The ECW220S is a great choice for SMBs that want extra layers of wireless security. It delivers a superb range of features for the price, is a fine performer, and the EnGenius cloud portal makes light work of AirGuard management. DAVE MITCHELL

EnGenius ECW220S specifications

It’s not often a podcast makes me furious, let alone one I’m appearing on at the time. But if you listened to episode 580 of our sister publication’s PC Pro Podcast in early February, you’d have detected more than a trace of irritation when it came to the ‘Hot Hardware of the Week’.

On that show, you’ll hear Darien Graham-Smith eloquently explaining why the Netgear Orbi WiFi 6E mesh router is the best thing since sliced Hovis.

Isn’t it brilliant, Darien enthused. There’s this new Wi-Fi standard – Wi-Fi 6E – and it allows you to smash data around the home at a terrifying rate, much faster than stodgy old Wi-Fi 6 that was released… about seven-and-a-half minutes ago. It’s so great, Netgear will charge you £1,500, although that’s not the end of your spend if you want to benefit from this bandwidth bonanza, because you’ll need Wi-Fi 6E radios in the client, too.

I sat there looking at my new MacBook Pro, barely a month old, with its already outdated Wi-Fi 6 radio inside and wanted to hurt someone. Possibly Darien. This is most definitely not brilliant.

The Wi-Fi peddlers have form here. Anyone remember the fiasco that was 802.11n, when the ever-eager manufacturers jumped the gun ahead of the standard’s ratification and released products based on the so-called “draft N” standard? When it came to the full release, many of the “draft N” products weren’t fully compatible with the 802.11n standard and lots of people ended up with routers that didn’t get the full benefit of the new speeds.

Now, to me, it feels like they’re at it again. It’s been less than 18 months since Wi-Fi 6 was finalised and it’s only been in the past year that we’ve really begun to see Wi-Fi 6 radios appear as standard in both routers and clients. My MacBook Pro, released in autumn 2021, was the first MacBook Pro to ship with Wi-Fi 6 , for example. I’ve not even had a chance to connect it to a Wi-Fi 6 router yet and it’s already out of date. It seems I was sold Draft-6.

Why is this any different to any other product? After all, the MacBook Pro itself was updated in 2020, and I’m not venting at Apple for releasing another, much faster one in 2021. Likewise, the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra is the latest in a long line of iterative, annual smartphone releases. It doesn’t move the smartphone forward one jot; it’s little more than a reminder that the one in your pocket is getting on a bit. Why aren’t I kicking Samsung in the particulars?

Those product refreshes, of course, can be easily ignored. Standards are different. They (normally) set a bar for a generation to come. And when it comes to something as ubiquitous as Wi-Fi, those standards end up in all manner of products: routers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, smart home devices. They matter in a way that a jump from, say, Intel’s 10th generation to 11th generation chips does not.

Was it really beyond the foresight of the Wi-Fi industry to put the brakes on the release of Wi-Fi 6, knowing that the much faster 6E was just around the corner? No, it was not. They knew it was coming. Wi-Fi standards aren’t discovered by chance; they’re not oil fields or diamond mines.

A whole host of early adopters have gone out and bought Wi-Fi 6 equipment, only to find Wi-Fi 6E flicking the V at them as it shoots past in the fast lane. And, yes, I’m partly angry with myself, because for the past year or so I’ve been recommending Wi-Fi 6 routers as the solution to anyone who’s moaned about patchy home Wi-Fi. Just last month, for example, I recommended a punchily priced Netgear Orbi Wi-Fi 6 kit to a fellow podcaster who was struggling to get a signal in the upper reaches of his house. I’ll be avoiding him for a bit.

Of course, the early adopters will still reap the benefits of Wi-Fi 6. Nothing’s getting switched off, it’s all backwards compatible. But the industry needs to be better at this stuff. These are monumentally tough times. Everything is more expensive than it was a couple of years ago. This is the worst possible time to spend hundreds or thousands of pounds on new hardware, only to find it’s been smashed out of the park a few months later.

I feel like I’ve been mugged off. Judging by the comments made by listeners on the Hot Hardware section of the podcast, plenty of you do too. I’ll book a community centre so we can all vent our anger as one. Don’t ask for the Wi-Fi password when you get there. Just don’t.

Wi-Fi has been around for more than two decades, and in that time it has become as ubiquitous and vital as the Internet itself. Since Apple made the first move in 1999, adding Wi-Fi support to its then-bleeding edge MacBook range, the technology has evolved and splintered into a myriad of standards, but always with backwards compatibility, all the way back to those early 1mb/sec connections.

Wi-Fi 6 is the latest upgrade to the standard - and the first to add additional frequency spectrum in 15 years. Just over a year ago, the Wi-Fi Alliance gave final sign off for Wi-Fi 6, and it’s billed as being the biggest update to wireless standards in over a decade, but it brings with it more nuances and complications than ever before.

So what exactly is it, and how can it help you? We’ve collected answers to the biggest questions about Wi-Fi 6 here, so allow us to guide you through the wireless revolution.

What happened to Wi-Fi 1-5?

First things first - you haven’t missed Wi-Fi 1 to 5. The Wi-Fi 6 name is part of a rebranding exercise by the Wi-Fi Alliance. Up to now, standards have been referred to by the alphabetical suffix of its technical name. The most recent were “Wireless G” (802.11g), “Wireless N” (802.11n), and “Wireless ac” (802.11ac). To make them easier to differentiate, these have now been retroactively given the acronyms Wi-Fi 3,4 and 5, respectively. Wi-Fi 6, meanwhile, is more officially known as 802.11ax.

Another slight complication is that there are actually two versions of Wi-Fi 6 to watch out for. Standard Wi-Fi 6 uses the new technology, but broadcasts on the existing 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. A second revision, Wi-Fi 6e, introduces a whole new band - 6GHz. We’ll explain what that does for you in a moment.

It has always been the case that every new iteration of Wi-Fi standard is compatible with previous ones, and Wi-Fi 6 is no exception. But that doesn’t mean you can just buy a new router, pick up your trusty old laptop and get a speed boost. To really feel the benefit, you’ll need a Wi-Fi 6-ready device, and at present this is limited to a few high-end mobile phones and laptops, but that number is increasing all the time, so if you’re looking at new infrastructure, it would be wise to consider putting Wi-Fi 6 on your list of requirements.

Benefits of Wi-Fi 6

So what are the advantages of Wi-Fi 6? Put simply, the answer is throughput. In fact, there is a speed benefit, but it’s almost a by-product; an individual device connected via Wi-Fi 6 will see around a 37% increase in internet speeds, but the increase in throughput - that is to say, the amount of data that the router can process and send around the network - can mean a real terms increase of up to 300% for a network as a whole.

Part of the improved throughput is down to increased capacity. Although most access points are theoretically capable of issuing 254 internal IP addresses, in reality, most traditional wireless equipment starts to struggle to manage connections at around 70. Wi-Fi 6 equipment is generally capable of managing up to 200 - sometimes more in a multi-node environment such as a mesh Wi-Fi network.

That improved throughput has a number of notable side effects - first of all, improved Wi-Fi throughput leaves more of the network’s available capacity for wired connections, meaning that they will improve too, albeit passively. We noticed a small but significant increase in transfer speeds from a laptop to a NAS inside a Wi-Fi 6 environment. Equally, because of the way that Wi-Fi 6 routers parse signals in a more efficient way (called OFDMA), a Wi-Fi 6 device connected to a Wi-Fi 6 router could actually see a small improvement in battery life. Think of it as the router implementing an orderly queuing system, rather than trying to deal with every incoming signal simultaneously.

Other technical advances include widespread use of MU-MIMO, a more advanced version of beamforming, which ‘shapes’ the signal waves around each target object, rather than traditional MIMO which points the entire signal in the right general direction. Dynamic fragmentation means that packets of data can be made up of different sizes, so the system isn’t trying to ‘fill’ standardised packet sizes on the fly. This reduces latency, as the router isn’t waiting to fill half-full packets before transmitting them. Additionally, in the case of Wi-Fi 6e, the signal can be broadcast on any frequency between 1GHz and 6GHz, rather than being limited to the two standard bands of 2.4GHz and 5GHz, making for a more reliable connection.

Do I need Wi-Fi 6?

So is it worth upgrading? There’s not really a ‘one size fits all’ answer to that question, but when you are ready to upgrade, Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6e should definitely be on your shopping list, as more and more devices are released that take advantage of it. If you go for “6”, you’ll get the network advantages, but the data is carried over the existing bands, so the differences you’ll see on your existing devices may be limited.

If you’re lucky enough to have devices that are Wi-Fi 6 ready, you’ll notice a small difference (we clocked a 4Mb/sec speed jump on a compatible smartphone). Overall though, even on a network of Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 4 devices, the combined improvements will add up to a slicker, more stable network.

Wi-Fi 6e with the additional 6GHz band is almost exclusively available on network infrastructure (routers and access points) at present and offer buyers a chance to future proof their networks for at least 10 to 15 years. Endpoint devices with 6GHz support are starting to become available and it’s these that will see the biggest individual benefits. Like all bleeding edge technology, Wi-Fi 6e currently has an early adopter premium, but is likely to become more competitively priced in the future.

The overall message here is that Wi-Fi 6 is going to be a gift that keeps giving. You may not notice a huge change today, but as the number of devices attached grows (and IoT devices are a big part of this), you’ll find a faster, more stable network than you’d have had with the same group of gadgets connected to Wi-Fi 5. As time goes on and more of those devices support Wi-Fi 6 natively, you’ll see further improvements. Plus, once WPA3 becomes the norm for encrypting your connection, you’ll see it being enforced in Wi-Fi 6, making for a more secure network.

It’s still early days for Wi-Fi 6. It has the potential to be a gamechanger, particularly as wider adoption across devices, from IoT devices to laptops and beyond, will maximise the benefits being offered by the new features. Today, you’ll still get a flavour of its value right out of the box, but technology doesn’t stand still for long. Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) is already being drafted by the Wi-Fi Alliance for certification in just a few years time. For now, however, Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6e are the pinnacle of wireless networking.

Starlink, the low orbit satellite-based broadband service established by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, has signed its first in-flight Wi-Fi deal.

Its services will be used on up to 100 planes chartered by JSX, which announced the partnership on Thursday night over Twitter.

JSX is the first air carrier to adopt SpaceX’s Starlink Wi-Fi in-flight, with the service expected to become available “later this year” at no extra cost to passengers.

Commenting on the announcement, JSX co-founder and CEO Alex Wilcox said that the aircraft carrier’s customer’s had “repeatedly asked” when JSX would start offering in-flight Wi-Fi:

“We’ve said that we’ll do it when we find the best product in the world. Today, I’m proud to say, we’ve found it and the wait for Wi-Fi on JSX is nearly over,” he added.

Originally founded as JetSuiteX in April 2016, the company operates 30-seat Embraer ERJ aircrafts for semi-private flights between select locations in California, Nevada, Texas, and Arizona.

The in-flight Wi-Fi service will allow JSX passengers to simply log in without requiring additional portals, nor login processes, according to SpaceX VP of Starlink commercial sales, Jonathan Hofeller.

“With Starlink, we’re able to provide an internet experience similar to or better than what passengers experience at home. We are creating a future that, when all customers walk on to the plane, the internet just works – no hassles, no logins. By being the first air carrier to adopt Starlink, JSX is setting this new standard for air travel,” he said.

Established by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Starlink launched its first 60 low orbit satellites in May 2019, providing high speeds with low latency while eliminating the need to install physical cabling, which is especially difficult to install in rural and remote areas.

The announcement comes eight months after SpaceX secured a licence to establish a ground station on the Isle of Man with an aim to expand Starlink’s coverage to the entirety of the UK. The company was also involved in talks with the UK government to attempt to solve the UK’s connectivity crisis, particularly the widespread concerns that more remote parts were being left behind.

There’s never been a better time to upgrade your network to the latest Wi-Fi standard. Prices for business-grade Wi-Fi 6 access points (APs) have been falling steadily, and Zyxel has taken this to the next level with its NWA90AX unit, which costs just £79. As you’d expect at this low price, it’s only an AX1775-rated AP, but the NWA90AX can be managed in standalone mode or remotely using its Nebula Control Center (NCC) cloud platform.

It’s also the smallest Wi-Fi 6 AP we’ve yet seen; this palm-sized plastic slab measures a mere 140 x 140 x 38mm (WDH) and weighs only 290g. Its Gigabit port supports PoE+, but worry not if you don’t have a suitable source, as the price does include a power adapter.

The NWA90AX is simple to deploy in standalone mode, with its web console wizard guiding you through setting the country of operation and changing the default admin password. One SSID on each radio is also enabled, but you should change the encryption key immediately, as the default one is very easy to guess.

Profiles and objects are used to configure further wireless settings, and both radios can broadcast up to eight SSIDs. Each can be assigned their own profile with options for strong WPA3 encryption, upload and download rate limits and quality of service (QoS) for prioritising voice or video traffic.

You’ll need to move to cloud management if you want to use captive portals to authenticate guest users, but this is easy to do; we logged into our cloud account using the NCC app on an iPad, selected our site and scanned in the QR code on the AP’s label. The app instantly picked up its MAC address and model name, added it to the site and, five minutes later, the AP started broadcasting our cloud-managed SSIDs.

The basic NCC cloud service is free, but logging is restricted to a rolling 24 hours with features such as email alerting and scheduled firmware updates disabled. These features and more are available in the NCC Plus and Pro packs but, unlike Zyxel’s higher-end APs, the price of the NWA90AX doesn’t include a trial subscription.

It’s worth noting that Zyxel offers a NWA50AX model that only costs £61 and, to the casual observer, looks identical. However, it doesn’t support Layer 2 isolation, WPA Enterprise encryption or any of NCC’s captive portal features.

There are no such issues with the NWA90AX, as we could create up to eight SSIDs per site in the NCC portal, each with its own encryption scheme, and enable captive portals on selected SSIDs. These can be customised with company logos and set to present walled gardens, while guest authentication methods comprise NCC-managed usernames and passwords or click-through acceptable use policies (AUPs).

Performance initially looks underwhelming. Large file copies between a Windows 10 Pro workstation sporting a TP-Link Archer TX3000E Wi-Fi 6 PCI-E adapter and a server on our 10GbE LAN returned close-range speeds of only 56.4MB/sec, dropping slightly to 53.9MB/sec at ten metres.

The reason for this is all Zyxel Wi-Fi 6 APs see the copy test as a single stream and assign one CPU core to this activity. To keep costs down and reduce heat output, the NWA90AX uses a cheaper MediaTek quad-core CPU, which isn’t as powerful as the Qualcomm models in Zyxel’s higher-end APs.

When the AP is handling multiple streams, it assigns them to different CPU cores so cumulative performance will be higher. We confirmed this by running iPerf across the workstation and server with ten streams returning a total of 86MB/sec, while an SSH session to the AP confirmed that the workload was being spread evenly across all four CPU cores.

Small businesses looking to upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 will be very tempted by the low price of the NWA90AX. It packs plenty of features into its minuscule shell, including cloud management, and although performance isn’t as good as more expensive Wi-Fi 6 APs, it will be enough for small offices servicing multiple clients.

Zyxel NWA90AX specifications

At this point, it should be clear that remote working is here to stay, but while we've all hopefully sorted out proper working spaces with all the laptops, keyboards, monitors and video conferencing equipment that we need to work effectively from home, one element that often gets overlooked is networking.

With cloud and SaaS platforms becoming more vital than ever for modern business, a robust network infrastructure is now just as vital for the home as it is for the office. This week, we're talking to PC Pro associate editor and co-host of the PC Pro Podcast, Darien Graham-Smith, to find out how you can turbo-charge your home network connection, and why it's worth taking the time to audit your infrastructure.

Highlights

“It is definitely the case that no two networks are the same. There are network engineers who've been in the business for 30, 40 years, and they will definitely tell you, every job is like a completely new learning experience to find out the ins and outs and the whys and wherefores of the particular way that all these things have been lashed together with Cat5 cable and so forth.”

“Wi-Fi 6 is becoming the standard, and a good, new, modern Wi-Fi 6 chipset can actually outperform a gigabit Ethernet connection for short range burst transmissions. So if you move up to Wi-Fi 6e, 6e doesn't actually raise the maximum speed of Wi-Fi, but it does move into a much less congested frequency range, so you're less likely to have problems with interference - so you're more likely to get the maximum speed or get higher speeds over a longer range.”

“There are many routers which will accept a USB 4G dongle, and you can plug that in, and you can set the router to use it as a failover. So you won't even necessarily know that your internet line has gone down except that probably it will be a little bit slower. If you think about what companies do, responsible businesses will definitely have a backup line at all times. There's no particular reason why we should imagine we can work from home and not have similar failsafes.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• Exposing Silicon Valley’s remote working hypocrisy
• Why I need a gaming monitor for work
• Netgear Orbi Pro Wi-Fi 6 review: Super-fast and super pricey
• Wi-Fi 6E chipset shipments will triple by 2022
• What is Wi-Fi 7?
• Wi-Fi vs 5G: Is it time your business ditches broadband?
• Fastest Wi-Fi speeds in the world
• Best Wi-Fi routers and access points 2022
• Superspeed your network for free... or nearly
• What is network topology?
• View from the airport: Networking at MWC 2022

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This automatically-generated transcript is taken from the IT Pro Podcast episode ‘Supercharging your home office network'. To listen to the full episode, click here. We apologise for any errors.

Adam Shepherd

Hi, I'm Adam Shepherd.

Bobby Hellard

And I'm Bobby Hellard.

Adam

And you're listening to the IT Pro Podcast where this week, we're talking about how to beef up your home office networking, and why you should consider upgrading it in the first place.

Bobby

Hybrid working is now a fact of life. But although this brings a range of benefits, it also means that our home networks need to be business-ready in order to support our modern digital working practices. Your existing broadband connections and wireless infrastructure might be fine for watching Netflix on the couch. But this doesn't mean it's capable of keeping up with cloud file sharing, back to back video calls and other bandwidth intensive tasks.

Adam

Today, we're taking a look at why you may want to upgrade your home network to make it suitable for remote working, as well as how to go about beefing up your connectivity. We're joined by Darien Graham-Smith, associate editor of PC Pro, co host of the PC Pro Podcast and all around networking guru. Darien, it's a pleasure to have you back on the show.

Darien Graham-Smith

It's a pleasure to be on the show. Hi, guys.

Adam

So today we're gonna be talking about networks, which is, as I'm sure all our listeners will agree, one of the most interesting topics in the world when it comes to IT. But what is the most important thing to bear in mind when you're planning out a home office network?

Darien

Well, I mean, that's a very good question. Because every, every business is different. And every home office is different. And even if you imagine that the classic, you know, the classic pandemic era home office has often been just a laptop on the table somewhere. It's not just about your own device, it's about the whole environment and what else is competing with it for bandwidth. And what it is that stands between your let's say, your MacBook, and the server in the office or the cloud server that contains your, your work or the Gmail account that you need to get to. And in that case, I'm talking about the router, and about the the Wi Fi or the wired connection that you have to it. And, of course, the broadband connection behind it. There is no single most important thing that that applies to all environments. And perhaps the first step should be to audit what you've got and work out, you know, just where the potential bottlenecks might be in your particular setup.

Adam

I think that's one of the things that is very easy to forget, even for kind of seasoned networkers such as ourselves that networks are a, well, a network, funnily enough, of kind of interconnected devices and kind of infrastructures, and every element is sort of, to a certain extent, interreliant on on everything else, you know, you can't really look at a particular element in isolation.

Darien

Yes, I mean, I think you may have been slightly tongue in cheek when you said networks were the most interesting aspects of computing. But I mean, it is definitely the case that no, no two networks are the same. There are network engineers who've been in the business for 30-40 years, and they will definitely tell you, every job is like a completely new learning experience to find out the ins and outs and the whys and wherefores of the particular way that all these things have been lashed together with Cat5 cable and so forth.

Adam

Yeah, I was slightly tongue in cheek, but at the same time, I do find myself getting possibly more excited about networking than I do about kind of any other element of my own kind of personal IT, if you like. Anyone who follows me on Twitter will know that I recently sorted out my own home networking with wired connections throughout my house for the first time in like a year and a half, since I've moved into my current place. And it's just been an absolute revelation. So I've taken much joy in kind of plugging all my various hardwired things into kind of cat6 connections and watching watching my speeds, you know, triple and quadruple. So speaking of which, then what do our own kind of home office networks look like? Because we've been doing the whole remote working thing for at least two years now. So we should have, should have had a decent amount of time to sort of get a setup that works for us, Bobby, what is your network look like at the moment?

Bobby

Well, it's pretty standard, I think it's what you'd find in most homes. To be honest with you, I'm in that bracket of people that probably didn't think too much about their broadband set up until we were all forced to work from home, I remember the, you know the first couple of months of lockdown where we were only allowed to go to the shops for certain items? I actually broke a part of my connection with my couch, moving it all around. So I had to run into, I think it was Sainsbury's and Argos to find an ADSL filter because I'd smashed it on the foot of the chair. That was like two days of panic where I thought I'm not gonna be able to work. But yeah, I'm at the other end of the scale compared to you guys; I probably don't think about as much as I probably should.

Adam

Darien, what about you?

Darien

Well, I've been working from home for just over seven years now. So I've had some time to really evolve my setup. At the back end of it, I've got a Virgin broadband. It's a domestic one. I think a lot of us these days are working on domestic lines, which is, which is fine as far as it goes. But you don't have an SLA. You know, it depends on if you're doing something critical, if the boss is really expecting you to be available and on call and so forth, you might need to think about having a fallback internet connection. Even if that's as simple as tethering an Android phone. Current Asus routers let you connect an Android phone via USB and use it as a fallback. Yeah, it's a very nice, neat solution. So if your, if your ISP goes down, you can seamlessly just switch over. But I haven't had to do that yet. So I think that's that's the sort of thing where you can probably, like most people can muddle through, don't take that as business class advice. It's just an observation. So I've got a I've got a fibre to my home. It's 200 megabits. Now, truthfully, I don't need that much to do my work. I've allowed that to creep up and it's useful a couple of times a month, one of the things I do is I download large ISOs for PC Pro, which then gets extracted, and we put them on the web for subscribers to download bonus software and so forth. Some of those are like eight gigabytes in size. And it's nice, it's not necessary, but it's nice to be able to download those in a matter of minutes rather than hours. The thing to look out for there, though, is like most domestic lines, mine is asymmetric. So I download it. And that's all fine and dandy. And I can extract when I need to and make sure it's all in the right shape. Then when I come to upload it, that's more like an hour's wait. Yeah. And this is fine. It's just, you know, to be honest, you know, only a couple of years ago, that would have been considered pretty good. And a lot of it is quality of life stuff rather than this necessity. So what I've landed on 200 megabits for now, and doubtless when my contract expires, they'll they'll try to shunt me up to 500. And if if history is any guide, I'll probably fall for it.

Adam

Yeah, I I'm on a 500 500 megabit line. And I have to admit, I am an absolute sucker for the whole, you know, monkey brain, big number good thing. Yeah, I objectively do not need 500 meg in order to get things done. But again, it is it's it's nice to have, it's nice to have the the security of knowing that we've got more bandwidth and more speeds than than we could ever possibly need.

Darien

Yeah, one other use case, actually, I should mention is if you're working, as I do with some clients, using shared cloud drives - sorry, I should say synced cloud drives, that's the key part. The faster your connection, obviously, the more likely it is that at any given point, you're going to have the latest version of everything, and your latest versions of everything will have successfully uploaded. 99% of the time it's marginal and the big file that someone edited this morning will have had plenty of time to come down onto your computer. But for example, you do get cases where I might quickly finish off something, hit Save, close up my laptop, leave the house, the faster your line is, the less likely it is that something's going to slip through the cracks. Anyway, so I haven't even got really into my house yet in terms of my home network. Now I use a mesh system, I use a Netgear Orbi mesh system, which is, again, not necessary for my work, there's many, many ways I could do it. And I could use a normal router, because it so happens that my home office is directly above the living room where the line comes in. So I could quite happily use Wi Fi to connect straight through the floor, that would be no problem at all. But I do use an Orbi system, because my home extends some way behind that. And it's just nice. Again, it's a quality of life thing. I don't really do any work in the bedroom or the bathroom, but I'm a human being. And I like to, you know, I like to have decent speed, consistent Internet access everywhere. That is overkill for most people. And in particular, it is enormously overkill what I have, because at the moment, I'm doing a long term test of the Netgear Orbi, Wi Fi 6e system. So I've got 6Ghz networking going on in my home, which is fine and dandy, and it does give me some good speeds, the system costs £1,500. And truthfully, I think I would notice absolutely zero difference if I were using something like, I've just been trying out the TP Link Deco X90 system, which costs £400, and is really just as fast for almost like almost every intent and purpose, there's a couple of places where the Orbi is about 10 megabytes a second faster. But really, all of this is way, way, way above the practicality threshold. But the thing about the Orbi is it has very fast 4.8 gigabits per second backhaul between its three stations, and each station also has 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet. So what I can do is, I've got an Orbi node sitting in my study, my home office. And that is connected via ultra fast link to the main unit. And then I have a wired connection from that to my desktop. I actually have a desktop PC I use for most of my work from home. And we're not really here to talk about ergonomics, but I do find having a full size keyboard and full size monitor just non negotiable as a full time home worker.

Darien

And I you mentioned that wired. Wired is still like it has many, many advantages over over any kind of wireless connection. And even though the backbone of what I'm doing is wireless, I did my own tests. And it was just silly how much smoother and consistently fast it was for me to copy files back and forth to a local NAS drive connected to the main router, using a wired connection to the Orbi station and reducing the number of wireless hops, reducing the amount of wireless that happens. Incidentally, because it's 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet on the Orbi system, I thought I might as well take advantage of that. I've got a Mac Mini which I use as my main system at the moment, that only has gigabit Ethernet. But you can buy a USB 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter for literally 30 quid off Amazon, have it arrive next day and just plug in and go. And it really does, it really does raise the roof, even if you are you would think that you're that you would look at the speeds that you're getting. And think there's nothing to be gained here because they are well below the gigabit boundary. But actually it does appear, and this is kind of anecdotal, but I think every network engineer will it will know it, that even when you seem to be well within the headroom of a wired connection, increasing its bandwidth can often magically give a boost even within that envelope.

Bobby

So at what point should we start thinking about adding network switches?

Darien

Um, well, I mean, that's that's another very, very subjective question. And the nice thing about switches which maybe isn't quite so well known, is that you can and take a single 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet connection on a router. I'm focusing on 2.5 gigabit, by the way, because that's coming up quite a lot in domestic gear now, which I think home workers are likely to have; 10 gig Ethernet has been quite standard in bigger businesses for a long time. And you also get 25 and 40 gigabit cards now, but 2.5 seems to be the one that's coming into the home space. And there's a lot of routers and mesh systems now coming out, which just have one 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet connector. And this is not all that useful, because obviously, you can't have use one socket to have two devices talking at 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet speeds, because one of them has to go into a slower socket, but you can hang a two and a half Gigabit Ethernet switch off that single socket. And suddenly you've got like five or eight or however many available two and a half gigabit connections. So it really can like lift the speed limit on your network. That said, as I think we've you know, we keep coming back to, it's really easy to get sucked into the idea that more speed is always better. And that's it's always nicer, perhaps, but it's not necessary. And it does cost money. I recently bought a two and a half Gigabit Ethernet switch for myself, it was about 100 quid, and I thought I very nice. Yeah, I thought that was a pretty good deal. But you can buy a gigabit switch for £15 now. So if your employer is not reimbursing you for your infrastructure, it might be an easy decision. So I mean, really the answer is you should buy a switch, when you have more things that you want to wire than, than you have sockets. You can also use I think maybe Adam, you mentioned you did this, perhaps I'm remembering wrong, you can also use a switch as a sort of ad hoc, just physical extension, because the problem. The problem with wired networking is of course, you very few of us, I'm going to stick my head out and say none of us live in homes, which were originally designed, you know, with with Ethernet or fibre cabling, like it's sunk into the walls, as many offices are designed, or at least they're designed to accommodate that. And so why why networking is often too much of an inconvenience for home workers to bother with it. But if it's helpful at all, like if you have multiple rooms that that want serving, then if you can, for example, tuck a switch somewhere on a landing or in a hallway, then that can be a convenient hub from which other wired connections fan out.

Adam

And and I have indeed done that. I did end up using a PoE switch. But I think this, this raises an interesting question of whether or not it's worth using wired connections, rather than wireless connections, because I think most people, because it's so convenient, and all the rest of it kind of gravitate towards wireless connections, by default for everything from kind of, you know, laptops and PCs, and all of that kind of stuff all the way through to printers and those kinds of general office peripherals that you might have. Like Bobby, for example, I'm assuming that the vast majority of your networking is wireless rather than wired.

Bobby

Yeah. Correct.

Adam

Is it then kind of switching some of that over to wired connections?

Darien

I'm sorry to keep on kind of playing the, the piece of string card but I mean, really, when you say is it worth it? In some situations it might be, in some situations it might not. The key thing is to really understand what the difference is. The received wisdom, the assumption has been for a very long time that wired will always be faster than wireless. But it's been true for for almost the entirety of the existence of wireless networks. However, we're in a situation now where although the bar is raised is rising, the vast vast majority of domestic routers out there have got Gigabit Ethernet. But Wi Fi six is becoming the standard and a good new modern Wi Fi six chipset can actually outperform a gigabit Ethernet connection for short range burst transmissions. So and if you move up to Wi Fi 6e, 6e doesn't actually raise the maximum speed of Wi Fi, but it does move into a much less congested frequency range, so you're less likely to have problems with interference, so you're more likely to get the maximum speed or get higher speeds over a longer range. So if your priority is speed, then it's possible that actually sticking with Wi Fi, if not, will be better, at least might be closer to wired speeds than you might expect. The thing about thing about Ethernet is it's much more stable and consistent than Wi Fi, with the best will in the world Wi Fi is kind of designed to to, it's designed to acknowledge that packets are going to get dropped and things are going to need retransmitting; there is absolutely no guarantee of performance over Wi Fi. To be fair, there's no guarantee of performance over Ethernet either. But in practice, if you look at a network metre, and just look at the throughput and look at the graph, and see how the speeds are oscillating all over the place over Wi Fi compared to what will be a much much much steadier graph over wired networking, the strengths and weaknesses of both are very obvious. Now normally, it doesn't really matter. Because things like you know, Zoom are designed to, to work in a wireless worlds, they buffer, they degrade gracefully. So if the if the connection drops its bit rates abruptly for short periods and comes back up, you may not even notice, it's all dealt with very cleverly. But the more you're reliant on your, your network, and the more you're reliant on something being available, running smoothly, completing in a predictable time, the more the attraction of wired networking becomes obvious.

Adam

And I think for home workers in particular, outside of a couple of specific kind of industries and use cases like for example, media and entertainment or graphics professionals where you're likely to be downloading and uploading large quantities of quite dense files, you know, video files and all that kind of stuff on a regular basis. For quote, unquote, the average home worker, where most of what you're likely to be doing is working with SaaS tools, working with video conferencing suites, working with kind of cloud file sharing all that kind of thing, I would argue that stability really is far and away the the most important metric rather than kind of raw speed. And in that situation, that's where Ethernet, I think, for me really comes into its own. And I think that's where Ethernet is kind of often a bit overlooked by people kind of kicking out home workers by businesses kind of kicking out home workers and kind of

Darien

Because I mean, like I was saying with Zoom, everything has been designed for a wireless world, so you won't normally see big problems. Even if you're using a flaky Wi Fi five connection. Even if you're using a flaky Wi Fi four connection, it's very likely that you can get your work done and you won't, you won't have to apologise to your boss for not being able to join a call or not being able to upload a spreadsheet. So I don't want to give people the idea necessarily that they need to completely forsake Wi Fi and they need to rip up the floorboards and run cat6 everywhere. But I would say you know, given the choice, my top choice if if everything were achievable and free. Right now I would definitely go with 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet wired almost almost everything in my home except you know, laptops and mobile phones where the whole point is that they are well mobile. But you know, if you want to know what what standard you accept, look at the standard that you that you walk past. I haven't actually implemented that myself except in the one; well, there's only two two and a half gig Ethernet links in my house for real. One, as I say, connects my desktop to an Orbi station. The other one downstairs connects the other Orbi station to a NAS appliance. That's the that's the situation where the big big files that you mentioned, most often, you know that the backups go and so on. Obviously, I think it's worth it for that. But otherwise, you know, if if your employer will fund two and a half gig or five gig or 10 gig Ethernet throughout your home, if it can be done in a way that fits your lifestyle and fits your your architecture, that's brilliant. If not, you know, depending on your use case, it might not be, you know, it might not not be a deal breaker in terms of working from home.

Adam

So, Bobby, have you had the urge over the last kind of couple of years to do any kind of network upgrades at all?

Bobby

No, I can't say I have, mostly because what I do isn't that intensive. I think the only times I've wished that done something properly is when it drops out. Because quite common now Virgin Media, you get days of downtime. I mean, yesterday, it dropped out for the morning, and I just had to use my mobile data, and tether it. But yeah, I haven't, haven't had the urge to do any physical, like rig networking or anything like that.

Adam

And again, I think that that comes back to the point where we're saying around stability. And I can imagine actually saying that, it must be very frustrating for people that have put a large amount of time and effort and investment into, you know, kitting themselves out with a lot of very intensive network upgrades for their home office, only to have their internet service provider kind of drop the ball on them.

Darien

As I mentioned before, I mentioned Asus routers, because they have the very neat ability to connect an Android phone and just but there are many routers, which will accept a USB 4g dongle, as they say. And you can plug that in, and you can set the router to use it as a failover. So you won't even necessarily know that your internet line has gone down except that probably it will be a little bit slower. If you think about what companies do businesses, responsible businesses will definitely have a backup line at all times. There's no particular reason why we should imagine we can work from home and not have similar fail safes. You know, if we if we're going to tell our employers, we are able to do the job remotely, then it's kind of on us to make sure that that that's actually true. It's definitely worth considering. But I think it's important that you at least audit what you have and what your options are. And look at I mean, for example, Bobby, you say that you've had problems before with your your ISP in your area. Just set your expectations and your employer's expectations realistically about what your availability is going to be and know what your plan is for dealing with unexpected outages because they perceive happen.

Bobby

There's one thing we kept reporting on in the first year of the pandemic was that these outages would become more common because more people are obviously working from home and it was more pressure on the networks. Is that still likely to be the case that we're gonna see more and more frequent outages, I guess?

Darien

I mean, I haven't personally noticed in the past 12 months as things have kind of been oscillating back and forth. But things seem to have been much more stable. I mean, you know, the people talk all the time about one of the whole benefits of the cloud is scalability and obviously that doesn't necessarily apply to ISPs. But I think I gather, you're talking about the entire infrastructure that we use, the back ends, the cloud services, all of that. I think, you know, I don't want to be overconfident but it seems like they quite quickly got a handle on what the the maximum likely number of people working at home or demanding to use Zoom at once or demanding to stick their things on AWS at once was. So fingers crossed, we should have had now a great kind of a great realisation of what the what the parameters are in this brave new world. Again, you cannot rely absolutely on any kind of suggestion that some problem is now solved, and outages or problems will not recur again. But I think I'd say to an employer who was worried about that, I would say, any business, which is still in 2022, having regular outages, just because they can't cope with the number of people using their service is going to go out of business. It's not a viable way to operate anymore.

Adam

Just going back to your point around setting employer expectations, Darien, Bobby, prior to this recording, you were mentioning a guy you spoke to last year that did effectively set up his own kind of edge infrastructure in his house to kind of address this problem.

Bobby

Yes, this is an IT consultant who lives about 10 miles outside of Chicago, in farmlands, he's got a farm house. And it's also in like a valley. So he basically had very little connection, and he had to sort of piece together four different services just to get some kind of operation and he had like servers in his basement and so forth. But any sort of other use from anyone else in the family, like his daughter or his, his partner would just cut the connection out for him completely. But he was talking about a router he had that would select the most, the strongest connection at any one time to keep them sort of online for a steady amount of time.

Darien

This actually brings me on to something that we touched on at the very start and haven't, haven't yet been back to. And so we were talking about one of the issues with making your home network fit for business is that ordinarily, your computer that you use for work is not going to be the only device competing for resources. There will be you know, someone watching Netflix downstairs, or there will be, there'll be something downloading on someone's bedroom PC. Many, many routers, I would go as far as to say, even in the world of domestic routers, unless you're going down to the absolute dirt cheap ones. They have QOS settings, they have quality of service options, which should allow you to prioritise specific devices and often specific services. And without doing anything else to your network, you may be able to just dive into the settings and say this work PC should always get traffic priority over everything else in the network, no matter what happens. And voice calls or video calls should always get priority over everything else. That's actually sometimes set up by default anyway, because it makes sense. And you may well find if you're if you're having stuttering, at the moment, you may well find that just ticking those two boxes and hitting apply is all it takes to completely transform your experience, it will of course have an effect on everybody else's experience. But services even like Netflix, which obviously demands a lot of bandwidth, they're designed to buffer as I said before, they're designed for the Wi Fi world, they don't expect to have the fastest smoothest connection all the time. So that can be a completely free way of getting a lift. I should say the only exception is probably if you've got a console gamer in your home who will themselves want to have the lowest latency and the maximum bandwidth, I expect, but frankly, if you're working and they're playing, I think I know who needs it more.

Adam

Well, quite. And I can imagine that's probably an issue, what would it being half term as we record that a number of our listeners will be having to contend with in terms of bandwidth sharing. But it's a it's a really good point around double checking your kind of network settings and your router settings. I would imagine most of the kind of networking professionals listening will be already very familiar with the specific settings of their particular router or network infrastructure. But for anyone who hasn't dived into the back end of their router, it's absolutely worth having a poke around in the kind of management console of your particular equipment, instructions for which can usually be found on the device itself. But it's very worth poking around to see what the options are. Whether or not there's any additional features or services you can enable to really get the best out of your equipment and to make sure that it's performing up to your specific needs. There's quite often traffic routing settings and various things like that which can be used to to really maximise the performance and in a lot of cases, the manufacturers are, I think, quite bad at explaining that these features exist in the first place. So yeah.

Darien

Yeah, I think the problem is that the back end, the web console, or even the smartphone app increasingly, that you use to manage your router is put together by engineers rather than, rather than communications experts. So yeah, you may well find that everything you need is right there. But it's buried under a system, under a menu called something like, you know, adaptive QoS, that you'd, you'd never click on unless you'd already Googled what it means.

Adam

Yeah, absolutely. It can be quite intimidating, some of the manufacturers' back ends, if you like.

Darien

But let us not, having said that, that we should not be discouraging anyone from diving in. Because in many cases, it's actually once you, once you get in there, it's quite clear what's what, so I would absolutely encourage everybody, even if your network seems fine, to go in and see what options are available, because there might be all sorts of gains you can have for free, not just performance, but security, for example, you might be able to turn on malicious site blocking or DDoS defence, there's all sorts of stuff built into modern routers that you wouldn't necessarily expect if you're just using them as a conduit to your ISP.

Bobby

So for those that are considering improvements to their networking, what are the sort of first steps they can take?

Darien

Well, the first one obviously is find, identify what exactly it is you want to gain from improving, I mean, is your, are you finding that your Zoom calls are breaking up and your files are taking forever to sync? If so then, you know, it's quite likely you don't need to buy anything new, you may well be able to get the result you need by checking the the settings on your router, checking what is interfering with your with your experience. And also obviously checking the backend checking the problem isn't that you're still using a five megabits dial up connection. And then really just for home workers, we keep, we keep sort of coming back to this, there's a big dichotomy between the best network you can have, and one which is practical, and in particular, affordable, if you're not having someone fund it for you. So really, it's a case of targeting your, your upgrades where they're going to make a difference. As a rule, I would say the single biggest change that I have seen, is buying a new router, you need to check your clients. Obviously, if you've got an older laptop, it might only have Wi Fi five, Wi Fi six will be faster in most cases. There's not much point buying, you know, a brand new Wi Fi six router if you're still gonna connect to over a Wi Fi five connection. And that's the sort of thing that you really need to be looking at it's, it's identifying that where the bottleneck is or where the problem is, and, and investing smartly, intelligently and in a focused way, because you're not with the best will in the world going to replace your entire home network with a 40 gigabit fibre set up or at least if you are, I'm afraid you're outside of my field of expertise.

Adam

Yeah, I'm sure in an ideal world, many of our listeners would replace all of their networking with 4040 Gig fibre in a heartbeat. But it's one of those things much like buying a sports car, you don't really need it for your day to day, it's just a cool thing to have.

Darien

The other thing that actually I just like to wrap up with is, you know, I've been I've been getting a bit excited about Wi Fi 6e. And in fact, I've been getting a bit excited about the latest generation of Wi Fi six routers, which really the cap on performance, I've seen nearly 150 megabytes a second over Wi Fi six, wow. Yeah, which is incredible. It's way faster than then you can get over Gigabit Ethernet. But it's really important to remember that in the most for the most part. Now I think Adam, you're in a slightly different position previously, for the most part, your internet connection is almost always going to be narrower than your home network. So look there first, if you are working remotely, it is quite likely that that's that's the upgrade that's going to make the most difference to your professional productivity. Other stuff like moving files around and so on. That's, that's up to you. But the back end, that the bottleneck is almost always at that point.

Adam

Indeed, well on that nugget of wisdom. I'm afraid that's all we've got time for on this week's show. But thanks once again to Darien Graham-Smith for joining us.

Darien

A pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Bobby

You can find links to all the topics we've spoken about today in the show notes and even more on our website at itpro.co.uk

Adam

You can also follow us on social media as well as subscribe to our daily newsletter.

Bobby

Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast wherever you find your podcasts. And if you're enjoying the show, leave us a rating and a review.

Adam

We'll be back next week with more analysis from the world of IT. But until then, goodbye.

Bobby

Goodbye.

With fierce competition in the SMB Wi-Fi market, vendors need to offer something special to stand out. Enter D-Link’s Nuclias access points (APs), which offer full cloud management, plenty of business-class features and a choice of models at different speeds.

We tried out the entry-level DBA-X1230P, which claims an AX1800 performance rating. That’s arrived at by totting up theoretical speeds of 1,200Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 600Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band. It isn’t the cheapest AX1800 AP we’ve seen – Netgear’s WAX610 only costs £130 – but it’s better value than it appears, as the price includes your first year’s subscription to D-Link’s Nuclias cloud-management platform.

You’ll need it, as the DBA-X1230P doesn’t support standalone operations, but keeping your cloud subscription going isn’t expensive, with a further one-year licence costing £43 per AP, or £130 for three years. The Nuclias web portal provides all the management conveniences you’d expect; you start out by creating a parent organisation for your company, and then define sites for each office location. When you add an address for each one it appears in its rightful place in the dashboard’s company map, and you can then start setting up profiles to control each site’s wireless services.

D-Link helpfully provides profile templates for each Nuclias-managed AP model. These can be tweaked to suit and offer plenty of customisable options: you can decide which radios are active, create up to eight SSIDs for each one, optionally enforce strong WPA3 encryption and enable station isolation to keep wireless users away from the local network.

For testing, we hooked up the DBA-X1230P to the lab’s EnGenius ECS2512FP PoE++ multi-Gig switch. This worked perfectly well, but if you use one of D-Link’s DBS-2000 series of PoE switches, then this too can be managed from Nuclias, with yearly renewals costing £22 per switch.

It took us mere moments to add the AP to our cloud account; we achieved this by installing the Nuclias iOS app on an iPad, then using it to scan the QR code on its label. The app invited us to assign the AP to our site and let us choose a profile before the unit was plugged in. Once powered on, the AP automatically registered itself with our account and started presenting the SSIDs we’d defined.

If you’ve previously used the Nuclias web portal, you’ll notice that it’s recently been redesigned to focus more on site status and device availability. Sadly this means you now get less information about client activity and traffic throughput, but you can still find this in the mobile app: we were able to browse daily graphs of traffic and connected clients, with readouts of how much data was passing through each AP.

One area where the DBA-X1230P excels is guest networking. With support for up to 16 site SSIDs, there’s scope to present multiple guest wireless networks, and captive portal features are outstanding. You can present a click-through page with an acceptable use policy, require visitors to authenticate against a Nuclias-managed user list or connect to third-party providers such as Facebook, Google or Twitter. SMS authentication is an option, too, though to use it you’ll need to sign up with Twilio and pay 3p per message. Other guest controls include upload and download traffic limits and daily schedules that determine when guest SSIDs will be available.

While the DBS-X1230P doesn’t claim a huge amount of bandwidth, it achieved very respectable results in our real-world performance tests. Large file copies between a Windows 10 Pro workstation equipped with a TP-Link Archer TX3000E Wi-Fi 6 PCI-E adapter and a server on our 10GbE LAN were completed at an average speed of 93MB/sec at close range, dropping to a still very creditable 81.5MB/sec when the AP was placed 10m away in an adjoining room.

There’s no getting away from the fact that the DBA-X1230P is comparatively pricey for an AX1800 Wi-Fi 6 AP, and you’ll need to factor in the ongoing cost of Nuclias access. For the price, though, you get impressive real-world performance, easy deployment, good cloud management services and superb guest support.

D-Link Nuclias DBA-X1230P specifications

If you’re into software-defined networking, then Ubiquiti Networks has plenty to offer, including two very affordable Wi-Fi 6 access points. The entry-level model is the AX1800-rated UniFi U6-Lite, priced at just £81, but here we’ve tested the top-dog U6-LR. At £159 it’s almost twice the price, but it’s still well within reach of an SMB budget, and the extra money gets you a speedy AX3000 rating. Unusually, the U6-LR also supports the high-performance 160MHz channel width, which improves bandwidth and penetration for compatible clients.

That’s all part of the promise: the “LR” stands for “long range”, and though you can’t see them, the U6-LR features downward-tilting internal aerials that aim to offer improved coverage. As for speeds, the 2.4GHz radio bandwidth is pegged at 600Mbits/sec, while the 5GHz radio supports a far faster 2,400Mbits/sec.

Everything about the U6-LR oozes class, from the great build quality to the mounting kit in the box, which includes all the tools you need – even the template card has a built-in spirit level. Nor can we argue with Ubiquiti’s classy cloud management platform. To use it, you’ll need a local UniFi Network Controller (UNC) for each site, but the software is available as a free download for Windows, macOS and Linux – or you can use the UniFi Dream Machine Pro appliance (£297), which teams up wireless network management with gateway security services.

The cloud portal shows all available UNCs registered to your account, and selecting one takes you to its management console, from whence you can create site SSIDs that will be pushed out to all managed APs. There are options for guest networks, and outstanding captive portal features which let you customise the landing page, decide which radios and AP groups can be used and implement authorisation via voucher, card payment, RADIUS, Google, Facebook or WeChat.

We found the whole system worked seamlessly. After hooking up the U6-LR to our Ubiquiti USW-Pro-24-PoE switch and adopting it in the UNC console, it immediately received a firmware upgrade, then started presenting our predefined SSIDs.

The console’s informative dashboard shows the most active clients and apps, along with details of client device types and a rolling graph of wireless experience scores. The latter can show scores for specific APs, broken down into 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios, and the whole dashboard can be set to daily, weekly or monthly views.

The U6-LR itself is managed from the UniFi devices page, which shows details such as associated clients and channel utilisation and even lets you choose a colour for the AP’s LED ring, as well as selecting between 80MHz and 160MHz channels.

For performance testing, we used a Windows 10 Pro workstation with a TP-Link Archer TX3000E Wi-Fi 6 PCI-E adapter. This supports 160MHz channels, but we started out with the AP set to an 80MHz width. In this configuration, our copies of a 25GB test file between the workstation and a server on our LAN were completed at an average rate of 105MB/sec.

Enabling 160MHz channels improved things to 111MB/sec; we might have expected to see a bigger leap, but Ubiquiti has seen fit to equip this AP only with a Gigabit Ethernet port, meaning this is about the highest speed it can handle. That’s a shame, as there’s likely more performance potential here that you simply won’t be able to access.

Still, speed isn’t the only benefit of the 160MHz setting. It also helps overcome interference and obstacles, and when we moved the AP ten metres away from the workstation and into an adjoining room, our copies still completed at a very creditable 105MB/sec; swapping back to the 80MHz channel mode saw this fall to 93MB/sec.

It would have been nice to see a 2.5GbE port, but the U6-LR remains a fast Wi-Fi 6 AP with good range. It offers a wealth of features for a very fair price, and Ubiquiti’s UniFi cloud management services are among the best in town.

Ubiquiti Networks UniFi U6-LR specifications

Cisco has announced a range of services and products to support hybrid working, including a private 5G service for enterprises and new high-performance Wi-Fi access points tailored for enterprise campus environments.

The announcements focus on bolstering on-site enterprise networks to improve performance and accessibility for hybrid workers when they come to the office.

They target network infrastructures capable of supporting emerging business applications, including higher-resolution video traffic and immersive interfaces, Cisco said.

The private 5G service includes both 5G radio and Wi-Fi capabilities. Offered on a pay-as-you-go subscription model, the service is designed to minimize initial customer investment, and work is being done with third-party service providers to scope out customer environments and create tailored packages, Cisco explained.

Cisco will manage the cellular part of the solution, and customers use a cloud-based management portal to monitor and manage policy and enterprise networking devices, the vendor added. It also includes identity management, with secure access policies that allow users to access only the resources they need.

The company launched Wi-Fi 6E access points targeting hybrid business environments. Wi-Fi 6E extends Wi-FI 6 into the 6GHz radio spectrum for faster speed and reduces radio interference from other Wi-Fi devices. Cisco expects this to be useful for applications including augmented and virtual reality, which require high bandwidth and low latency.

The Meraki MR57 is a cloud-managed device featuring gigabit speeds. It offers radio optimization with multi-antenna MU-MIMO support and measures local metrics, including visit lengths and repeat visit rates so that administrators can measure performance across different campus locations over time.

Cisco also expanded its own line of silicon to power its Catalyst switches. Silicon One, its own ASIC architecture launched in December 2019, was its attempt to create a single silicon architecture that could be used in multiple products across the network. It was previously only available in service provider switches and routers, but now it will be available in its enterprise-class products, the company said.

This brings 400 Gbit capabilities into lower form-factor devices for enterprise campus environments with lower power demands, executives said.

The first products to get it are the Catalyst 9500X and 9600X switches, also announced on Thursday.

Cisco has already made forays into more immersive interfaces for hybrid workers. It recently announced plans for augmented reality capabilities in its Webex conferencing platform. Participants could see hologram-like video of each other using augmented reality headsets, it said.

SMBs wanting to upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 on a tight budget will find plenty to like about TP-Link’s Omada EAP620 HD. For a modest outlay of £136, this dual-band access point delivers a full set of business features, including the same cloud management services as found on much pricier models.

As you’d expect at this price, it’s not the fastest performer. It carries an AX1800 rating, made up of 1,201Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 574Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band. These are theoretical maximums, but there’s still a definite performance gap between this and an AX3600-rated AP like Netgear’s WAX620. When copying large files between a Windows 10 Pro workstation sporting a TP-Link Archer TX3000E Wi-Fi 6 PCI-E adapter and a server on our 10GbE LAN, we saw average transfer speeds of 87MB/sec at close range, which is 32% slower than we’ve previously seen from TP-Link’s AX3600-rated EAP660 HD. Moving the EAP620 HD to a distance of ten metres away saw our test speeds fall to 68MB/sec, 41% slower than the AX3600 model.

While the EAP620 HD may not be a speed demon, it offers plenty of features and two management choices. In standalone mode, its web console presents a quick-start wizard that requires you to create a new administrative user and password, sensibly removes the default admin account and guides you through the creation of your first two secure wireless networks.

Up to eight SSIDs can be assigned on each radio, and for strong security you can apply mixed-mode WPA3/WPA2 encryption to each one. Custom rate limits can be assigned to specific SSIDs, load balancing allows you to restrict the number of clients that can associate with the AP, and enabling the guest network option ensures that wireless users can’t access systems on the LAN.

For multi-AP deployments, it makes sense to use TP-Link’s Omada cloud management platform. For this, each site requires a TP-Link controller, which connects to your cloud portal account. TP-Link provides free controller software for Windows and Linux, but for testing we used the dedicated OC300 hardware appliance, which costs around £110.

To take advantage of the full set of cloud features, we connected the EAP620 HD to a TP-Link TL-R605 broadband router, and powered it from a TL-SG3210XHP-M2 PoE+ multi-Gigabit switch. This may sound like a lot of extra expense, but the router only costs £39, while the switch is a very reasonable £262, and using the two together means you can manage your entire network from one cloud portal.

After we’d powered up the EAP620 HD, it popped up in the cloud console as “pending”; once adopted, it promptly pulled in all wireless settings from the controller and started broadcasting our defined SSIDs. Cloud configuration supports the same eight SSIDs as standalone mode, with all the same features such as mixed WPA3/WPA2 encryption, rate limits and load balancing.

The cloud portal is a fine-looking affair, with a customisable dashboard that reveals everything you need to know about your network, such as wireless summaries, client distribution, most active clients and wireless traffic. Select a switch, router or AP and a panel pops up on the right with options to view all its details, remotely configure it and upgrade its firmware.

Cloud management also opens up more captive portal features than standalone mode. You can require authentication via password, local user, voucher, RADIUS or Facebook, customise your portal with pictures and branding logos, publish acceptable-use policies and create portals for workstations and mobiles.

The EAP620 HD clearly isn’t aimed at SMBs that want top Wi-Fi 6 performance and coverage, but it scores well for its competitive price. It offers plenty of business-class features, with TP-Link’s software and hardware controllers providing top-notch network management.

TP-Link Omada EAP620 HD specifications

Netgear’s Orbi Wi-Fi 6 was the world’s first 11ax mesh system, but the company is now moving the focus to small business users that want the same easily expandable wireless networks with the Orbi Pro. Costing nearly £600 for a pack of two, however, it isn’t cheap.

The Orbi Pro delivers tri-band wireless network services and its AX6000 rating indicates it has the same 2.4GHz and dual 5GHz radio speeds as Netgear’s RBK852 consumer model. It’s clearly aimed at business deployments, as Netgear’s parental controls and Armour anti-virus services have been stripped out and replaced with more useful stuff like four SSIDs, client isolation and WPA3 Enterprise encryption.

It also supports Netgear’s remote management using the Insight cloud portal and its optional Business VPN service. Netgear adds extra value too, as the price now includes a 5-year subscription to Insight Premium, which enables multi-site management, mobile app access and facilities to manage Insight enabled switches, routers and NAS appliances.

The SXK80 pack comprises an SXR80 router and SXS80 satellite which, at first glance, look identical. Underneath both are one 2.5GbE and four Gigabit ports, but the SXR80’s multi-Gig port is yellow to signify that it’s designed for WAN duties.

Netgear Orbi Pro Wi-Fi 6 review: Installation

These chunky plastic monoliths each weigh a hefty 1.2kg, so while they’re hardly discreet, they can be placed on a desk or shelf complete with rubber bases to stop them sliding. Alternatively, you can show them off on a wall with the supplied brackets.

Setup will depend on your existing network; the SXR80 can function as a standalone access point (AP) or a router, but they don’t support Power over Ethernet (PoE) so you’ll have to use the included power adapters. The SXR80 is initially set in router mode with DHCP services enabled, so we cabled a PC to its first LAN port and followed the web console’s setup wizard. With the WAN port connected to the lab network, it detected our existing gateway and router and recommended the AP mode - although you can select router mode if you wish.

Along with setting a strong administrative password, the wizard asks you to create a secure SSID which will be primarily used for management. Three more can be added for employees, IoT devices and guests, with the second and third ones allowing 2.4GHz and 5GHz services to be placed on separate SSIDs.

The included satellite is already paired with the router, but you can easily add more by placing them in range of the main AP, powering them on and pushing the sync buttons at the back on both units. Up to five more satellites can be added, which can expand coverage massively but at £385 each, these are also expensive.

Netgear Orbi Pro Wi-Fi 6 review: Management

The SXR80’s web console opens with a dashboard showing the status of the internet connection, the four wireless SSIDs, connected devices and any business VPNs. Setting up new wireless networks is simple and security is excellent; you can choose from personal WPA2 or WPA3 encryption, while the stronger Enterprise versions use an external RADIUS server.

The fourth wireless network is for guest internet access and uses either password or Facebook authentication while its captive portal can be customised with a company logo and an acceptable use policy (AUP). Download bandwidth limits can be applied to each SSID using slider bars and the console’s advanced settings provide access controls for blocking client devices or allowing them to connect to the network.

To use Netgear’s Insight portal, you simply add the main unit to your cloud account. Our iPad was already connected to its wireless network, so the Insight app spotted it immediately, claimed it and added it to our account.

Once connected, the Orbi Pro behaves differently to Netgear’s other business APs. Instead of resetting itself and broadcasting the site SSIDs, it keeps the ones you created in standalone mode. It doesn’t lock out the local web console either (although it does apply the site’s global device password), so you can manage your wireless networks and add more satellites using both methods.

The cloud portal lists all Orbi Pro devices and their satellites, and provides dashboards showing connected wireless clients. It also shows details on overall wireless traffic although in AP mode, it won’t report on any traffic. However, you can remotely configure wireless networks and VLANs, enable a basic captive portal for the guest network and provide separate DHCP services on each of the four SSIDs.

Netgear Orbi Pro Wi-Fi 6 review: Performance and range

For performance testing, we used a Dell Windows 10 Pro workstation equipped with a TP-Link Archer TX3000E Wi-Fi 6 PCI-E adapter and a Dell PowerEdge T640 tower server running Windows Server 2019. We connected the Orbi Pro to an EnGenius ECS2512FP multi-Gigabit switch and linked the server to one of the switch’s 10GbE SFP+ ports.

Performance is excellent as close range copies of a 25GB test file between the workstation and server returned average speeds of 114MB/sec. After moving the Orbi Pro 10 metres away and into an adjoining room, we recorded equally good speeds for our copies of 107MB/sec.

To test mesh speeds, we placed the satellite AP in a room on the floor above the main AP. After connecting an iPad to it, the SweetSpots iOS app reported a steady 70MB/sec throughput over the 5GHz backhaul link.

Netgear Orbi Pro Wi-Fi 6 review: Verdict

SMBs will find a lot to like about Netgear’s Orbi Pro Wi-Fi 6 as it’s very simple to manage and coverage can be swiftly expanded on demand. It delivers great wireless performance and range, plus support for Netgear’s Insight cloud portal - but it comes at a disproportionately high price.

Small businesses that want a super-fast and more affordable Wi-Fi 6 solution and don’t need the router functions in the SXR80, may want to consider the Netgear WAX630, which received our coveted Editor’s Choice award. This more discrete AP is better specified, supports meshing and yet costs £230 each with a 5-pack setting you back less than a grand.

Netgear Orbi Pro Wi-Fi 6 specifications

If you need an AP that’s capable of providing Wi-Fi 6 services to a big, busy office, Netgear’s sizeable WAX630 is just the thing: it’s designed to handle up to 600 clients and 100 concurrent connections.

It’s helped along by a massive AX6000 throughput rating, achieved by combining three 4 x 4 radios – that is, a 2.4GHz transceiver capable of up to 1,200Mbits/sec, plus high and low 5GHz radios each supporting connections at up to 2,400Mbits/sec.

What’s great about this setup is that you can choose how the radios are used. You can employ all three as front-haul connections for client devices, or set up a mesh network using compatible Netgear APs and use one of the 5GHz radios for a dedicated backhaul connection.

Each unit also offers a pair of Ethernet connectors. The main one supports 2.5GbE and works with both the PoE+ and PoE++ power standards – although if you’re going for a single-cable connection we strongly recommend you use the latter, as otherwise the WAX630’s peak performance drops by 50%. The second port runs at regular Gigabit speeds and can be either used to connect a wired device, or connected to the switch and aggregated with the 2.5GbE port.

Note that enabling aggregation causes the primary port to drop down to 1Gbit/sec, for an overall link speed of 2Gbits/sec: if you have a multi-Gigabit switch, you’ll get faster performance using the main socket on its own. For testing purposes we used the lab’s EnGenius ECS2512FP, which supports both 2.5GbE and PoE++ connections.

The WAX630 can be deployed in standalone mode, using a local web console for management. The browser-based quick-start wizard first requires you to change the default admin password, then offers to set up an initial SSID and presents a smart dashboard showing key information such as connection status, client distribution by OS and traffic trend graphs for each radio.

The WAX630 supports up to eight SSIDs, and you can choose to make them available across all three radios or only on selected ones. You can also decide whether to enforce secure WPA3 encryption or allow mixed WPA3/WPA2 support for legacy clients, and optionally enable isolation so clients get internet access but can’t see each other.

For larger deployments, Netgear’s Insight cloud portal can be used to set up a mesh and centrally manage multiple wireless networks, as well as a range of Netgear NAS appliances, switches and routers. The WAX630 comes with a one-year Premium subscription, after which subsequent years cost £8.95 per managed device.

Registering the WAX630 to our cloud account couldn’t have been easier; we simply used the Insight iOS app on an iPad to scan the QR code printed on its underside. We were then able to assign it to a predefined site in our Insight organisation, and once we powered the AP on and connected it to the network it immediately picked up the appropriate settings and started broadcasting our SSIDs.

The Insight console offers all the same information as the WAX630’s own portal, plus a full health summary of all cloud-managed Netgear devices, a topology map showing which APs clients are connected to, their detected operating systems and graphs of wireless traffic.

The WAX630 isn’t just flexible: it’s fast. Like most SMB Wi-Fi 6 access points, it doesn’t support the ultra-wide 160MHz channel width, but even so it enabled us to copy a 25GB test file between a Windows 10 Pro workstation equipped with a TP-Link Archer TX3000E Wi-Fi 6 PCI-E adapter and a server on the LAN at an average of 111MB/sec. That was at close range, but we were pleased to see that speeds only dropped to 94MB/sec when the AP was moved ten metres away.

Netgear’s WAX630 is a great choice of AP for dense Wi-Fi 6 deployments, as its triple radios deliver astounding performance in a conveniently integrated package. It’s easy to install, with an impressive range of remote management and monitoring services, and the price is very reasonable, too.

Netgear WAX630 specifications

DrayTek impressed us last summer with its first Wi-Fi 6 AP, the eminently affordable VigorAP 960C. Now the VigorAP 1060C dials up the performance: its AX3600 rating represents double the bandwidth of the 960C, with its 5GHz radio rated for up to 2,400Mbits/sec along with 1,200Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band. A third radio is included too, though this isn’t for client or mesh connections: rather, it’s used for rogue AP detection and 5GHz channel scanning, allowing the main network to dynamically detect and switch to the best available channel.

At the rear, a 2.5GbE uplink port ensures wireless connections aren’t bottlenecked, and it supports PoE+ for single-cable deployment. If you prefer you can use a separate power supply, but this isn’t included in the box – the optional adapter costs £20.

The 1060C is a flexible little thing. It comes with twist-on mountings for ceilings and walls, plus T-rail attachments for suspended ceilings. It can function as a standalone AP, act as a range extender or form part of a self-healing mesh network using DrayTek’s VigorMesh technology. Mesh groups comprise a root AP and up to seven node APs, which can be up to three hops away from the root – offering an easy way to provide coverage over a really broad area. Satellite units can also be connected together via Ethernet for maximum performance and reliability.

Management options are plentiful, too. If you have just one or two 1060C units then you can manage each one from its own web console, or you can auto-provision the units from any DrayTek router that supports the Central AP Management feature. Alternatively, you can centrally manage any number of onsite APs with the free VigorConnect Windows app, while service providers can use the VigorACS cloud service to look after multiple sites.

Setting up a standalone AP is a breeze. The web wizard walks you through setting a strong admin password and creating your first wireless networks; the 1060C can broadcast up to eight SSIDs on each radio, each with its own security settings and optional WPA3 encryption, or you can mix this with WPA2 to keep your legacy clients happy. You can limit the number of clients on each radio or SSID, apply upload and download bandwidth limits, and choose whether to block wireless clients from seeing LAN systems or other wireless users. For added security, it’s even possible to restrict individual SSIDs so that they only accept connections from Windows or macOS clients, or only from mobile devices.

The main dashboard provides plenty of information, including details of active clients and associations, SSID traffic throughput and AP system utilisation.

That third radio comes into its own here, too. On the console’s Radio Monitor page you’ll see a graphical readout of all channel activity, with details of any detected rogue APs. Unrecognised networks with their own SSIDs will be classed as a low-level issue, while anything broadcasting the same network names as the 1060C will be treated as a direct threat. We tested this by configuring a Linksys AP in the lab to use the same SSID as the 1060; as soon as it came online, the 1060C monitor page warned us, and an email alert was fired off too.

Finally, a station list provides details of all connected wireless clients, with names, uptimes and connection speeds. It will have a stab at identifying their OS too, although we found this didn’t work for all platforms: our Windows workstations were correctly identified, but our iOS and macOS clients came up as unknown.

As for performance, the 1060C excelled in our real-world Wi-Fi 6 tests. Close-range file copies between a Windows 10 Pro workstation with a TP-Link Archer TX3000E Wi-Fi 6 PCI-E adapter and a server on the LAN completed at an average of 107MB/sec; even from ten metres away we got a very creditable 91MB/sec.

The VigorAP 1060C is at the upper end of the price spectrum for a dual-band Wi-Fi 6 AP, but it offers a lot for your money. Performance is impeccable, management choices are extensive and its meshing feature makes it easy to extend your wireless network coverage.

DrayTek VigorAP 1060C specifications

Home and business Wi-Fi solutions provider Linksys has announced the launch of its new WiFi 6 Cloud Managed Access Point.

With 4x4 internal antennas, Linksys' WiFi 6 Cloud Managed Access Point provides fast, secure, and reliable WiFi built for the likes of retail stores, medical offices, small businesses, and commercial spaces supporting concurrent client connections, according to Linksys.

Linksys' Access Point also features a cloud-native operating system, zero-touch provisioning, access to Linksys Cloud, and unlimited device/network scaling.

“While many workers and companies embrace hybrid work solutions, offices and small businesses still need to ensure they have the latest in fast, reliable and secure Wi-Fi connectivity,” said John Minasyan, director of product management at Linksys.

“At Linksys, we recognize both sides of the hybrid work era, and in addition to our remote work solutions we are excited to also launch our newest WiFi 6 Dual-Band access point.”

Businesses can also choose to monitor and customize guest Wi-Fi access with Linksys’ Captive Portal. Before granting access to the internet, the portal directs users to an authentication page. Linksys’ cloud-managed indoor Access Point is also TAA-compliant for NDAA and GSA schedule contracts and federal use.

The Access Point is also equipped with Qualcomm's advanced Networking pro Platform 1200 chipset, ensuring wire-like stability and high performance.

Lastly, with support for Power over Ethernet (802.3af PoE or 802.3at PoE+), Linksys’ Access Point can draw both power and data from a single Ethernet cable, making it suitable for ceiling or wall mounting without the need for an AC outlet or separate power supply.

For meeting rooms, flexible workspaces or even hotel suites, TP-Link’s EAP615-Wall offers a great space-saving networking solution. This little wall-mounted access point (AP) is very affordable, and offers dual-band Wi-Fi 6 along with three downlink Gigabit Ethernet network ports, one of which supports pass-through Power over Ethernet for devices such as IP phones. It’s tidy, too, measuring only 20mm thick and made of sturdy high-impact plastic. The main Ethernet connector is at the rear, and the kit includes a metal baseplate so it can be fitted over a wall port and pushed down until it locks in place.

Technically speaking, the EAP615-Wall is an AX1800 dual-band wireless AP, with claimed speeds of up to 1,201Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 574Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band. It can be deployed and managed in standalone mode, but in almost all cases it will make more sense to use TP-Link’s free Omada cloud service, as this allows you to manage multiple APs from one portal.

If you take this route then each site requires an Omada cloud controller, but TP-Link offers this as a free software package for Windows and Linux, or you can use a pre-configured hardware controller running the Linux version. That’s how we tested the EAP615-Wall, using TP-Link’s OC300 controller. For the full Omada experience, we also hooked up TP-Link’s TL-R605 broadband router and powered our APs with a TL-SG3210XHP-M2 PoE+ multi-Gigabit switch.

The main web portal opens with a list of available Omada controllers, and selecting one takes you to its site, where you can view all associated cloud-managed devices. Since we’d already set up our site, adding our EAP615-Wall APs was as swift as you could ask for: after we’d connected them to the switch, they shortly appeared in the console’s device view as “pending”, and upon adoption they automatically took all wireless settings from the controller.

The EAP615-Wall supports up to eight SSIDs per radio, and on each one you can choose to enable strong WPA3 encryption, apply upload and download rate limits and use guest networks to ensure clients only get internet access. Captive portals can be activated and customised with pictures, logos and acceptable use policies, and you can require password, local user, voucher, Radius or Facebook authentication.

The three Gigabit Ethernet ports in the AP’s base are all enabled by default, and PoE services on the third port can be activated by ticking a box in the portal’s AP configuration page. From the same page, you can also enable VLAN support for each one and enter a VLAN number. We encountered no problems when connecting devices to these ports; when we plugged our Yealink IP phones into the third port on each AP, they correctly received power and internet access. Their information also appeared in the portal’s Clients page, although the portal was only able to report on the switch port their associated AP was connected to, and couldn’t provide any details about the AP itself.

As you’d expect, the EAP615-Wall isn’t as fast as the current crop of AX3600 APs, but it still gave us perfectly good performance. When copying a 25GB test file between a Windows 10 Pro workstation equipped with a TP-Link Archer TX3000E Wi-Fi 6 PCI-E adapter and a server on the LAN, we saw average speeds of a huge 87MB/sec close up, dropping to 72MB/sec when we moved five metres away from the AP.

We then tested range using the SweetSpots iOS app, and found that the wireless signal became unusable at a distance of 18 metres with two brick walls in the way. That’s not the widest reach we’ve seen, but it means the signal can easily fill a room and extend out into adjacent areas.

For businesses that need to target Wi-Fi 6 services in a specific location, TP-Link’s EAP615 is a very affordable solution that’s simple to deploy, with good performance and easy cloud management.

TP-Link Omada EAP615-Wall specifications

Wi-Fi 6 chipset shipments are expected to reach 1.5 billion units in 2022, while Wi-Fi 6E sales are set to triple, according to ABI Research.

Furthermore, Ultra-Wideband (UWB) devices are expected to surpass 500 million units, as their adoption among smartphones, wearables, speakers, trackers, and other RTLS applications grows.

The year 2021 saw Wi-Fi 6 become more widely adopted among major smartphone brands, including Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, OPPO, and Vivo.

With the increasing availability of Wi-Fi 6E chipsets and platforms from leading chip vendors such as Qualcomm, Broadcom, and MediaTek, the transition to 6 GHz devices will accelerate into 2022. Wi-Fi 6 adoption is also expected to be rapid in the tablet industry.

"The wireless connectivity landscape continues to evolve thanks to the emergence of new technologies, enhancements to established technologies, and continued innovation and competition across the chipset, module, and device ecosystems," explains Andrew Zignani, research director at ABI Research.

"2022 will be a critical year for wireless innovation as the rollout of Wi-Fi 6 rapidly accelerates well beyond flagship Wi-Fi devices, more and more devices support the 6 GHz band via Wi-Fi 6E, and UWB is embedded within increasing numbers of mainstream consumer devices."

Additionally, Wi-Fi 6 is seeing increased adoption in home entertainment devices. For instance, MediaTek and Samsung teamed up to debut the first Wi-Fi 8K TV in March 2020, followed by the first Wi-Fi 6E 8K TV in April 2021 built on MediaTek's MT7921AU chipset.

UWB will account for almost a quarter of smartphones, as more models incorporate the technology. As new models support Wi-Fi 6, ABI Research predicts greater uptake in 2022 and beyond. In the PC market, Wi-Fi 6E is expected to grow significantly in the notebook segment.

"By 2026, ABI Research forecasts there will be over 7 billion Bluetooth, 5 billion Wi-Fi, and well over 1 billion UWB annual device shipments. Greater availability of IoT-centric Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E chipsets, combo ICs, and innovations in performance and power consumption will combine to help the market to scale to new heights," added Zignani.

Netgear is making a name for itself in the world of affordable Wi-Fi 6 access points (APs). The WAX610 impressed us with mesh networking plus cloud management support for just £131; now, the WAX620 offers even more wireless goodness for only a few pounds more.

To wit, for £157 this AX3600 dual-band AP offers a speed doubling over the WAX610, promising up to 2,400Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 1,200Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band. To get the best performance, we recommend you use a PoE+ power source; the 2.5GbE LAN port also supports regular PoE, but using this incurs a performance penalty of around 40%. Alternatively, you can pay £13 for the official Netgear power adapter and use the dedicated socket.

The WAX620 has a low-key design, with a finned metal back plate that acts as a heatsink. You can mount it more or less anywhere: the box includes two brackets to suit various types of T-bar, ceiling or wall.

Once you power up the AP, the quickstart wizard prompts you to choose a management mode. If you opt for standalone operation, you’ll first be required to change the admin password; then the console opens up with a smart dashboard showing details such as connection status, client distribution by OS and traffic trend graphs.

You can now create up to eight SSIDs, decide which radios are active on each one and choose between WPA2 and the stronger WPA3 encryption. Advanced features include client isolation, rate limits, URL tracking and captive portals using click-through and Facebook or external authentication.

To get the most from the AP, however, you’ll want to manage it through Netgear’s Insight Pro cloud portal. The price includes a one-year subscription, which opens up mesh networking – which isn’t available in standalone mode – and permits central management of all wireless networks, as well as other Netgear switches, routers and NAS appliances.

Adding the WAX620 to our Insight cloud account was a doddle. You can use network discovery, scan the barcode on the box or manually enter the device’s serial number; we used the iOS app on an iPad to scan the QR code on its base and the AP was recognised immediately. Once we’d assigned the WAX620 to our organisation, local configuration was disabled (although the dashboard remained accessible for monitoring and troubleshooting), the firmware was automatically upgraded to the latest version, and – without any further involvement on our part – the AP began broadcasting all the SSIDs we had configured previously for our site.

You can keep tabs on network activity from the Site page of the portal. This shows a summary of all cloud-managed Netgear devices and can be customised to suit your priorities. We arranged it to show daily Wi-Fi traffic volumes, the number of APs, SSIDs and connected clients and overall network health, with a topology map showing which APs clients were connected to.

The Wireless page, meanwhile, gives an overview of all APs, with more detailed traffic graphs for each radio, plus detected OS and traffic statistics. Standard captive portals can be assigned to specific SSIDs; for £62 a year, the RaGaPa-powered Instant Captive Portal option uses a range of social network platforms to engage users and gather analytics.

To test performance, we connected the WAX620 to an EnGenius ECS2512FP PoE++ multi-Gig switch, and tried copying a 25GB test file between a Windows 10 Pro workstation equipped with a TP-Link Archer TX3000E Wi-Fi 6 PCI-E adapter and a server on the LAN. This AP doesn’t support the fast 160MHz channel width option, but it still delivered excellent speeds, averaging 106MB/sec at close range and dropping to 93MB/sec when we moved the AP 10 metres away.

For an AX3600 Wi-Fi 6 AP, the WAX620 is remarkably good value. Performance is hard to fault, and Netgear’s Insight cloud portal integrates it into a powerful all-round management platform, making this a fine choice for SMBs looking for high-speed, easy-to-manage Wi-Fi at a reasonable price.

Netgear WAX620 specifications

HPE has won a contract to provide network connectivity to the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, which will help connect the event’s workforce, volunteers, and athletes.

Aruba, a HPE company, is set to provide advanced networking technology to help the Birmingham 2022 hybrid workforce ensure the event is a success, by connecting headquarters, the Technical Operations Centre, and all other venues.

The networking company will deploy programmable edge-to-cloud technology, using Wi-Fi 6 and 6E. It said this will deliver AI-driven security and management in the cloud through Aruba Central to connect, protect, and analyse events and requests that come in across the network. It's hoped this will help IT teams identify potential threats before they have a chance to affect the event.

Aruba said its technology will also support the distribution of the results to press and broadcasters, and it has committed to work with local authorities and Birmingham 2022 to ensure that on-site equipment is made available to the community once the event is over.

“Aruba, using their expertise as part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, are the ideal company to provide a complex and flexible network connection, enabling a seamless experience for our workforce, volunteers and athletes,” said Adrian Corcoran, chief information officer at Birmingham 2022. “This is such an integral part of Birmingham 2022 and we’re confident Aruba will help us bring the Games to life.”

This isn’t the first time HPE has provided its technology to the sports industry, as in July 2017 Tottenham Hotspur chose the company as its official IT networking and wireless infrastructure partner for its new stadium. With Aruba, the club hoped to enable connectivity across the entire venue for visitors and flexibility to cater for future demands, especially as the stadium was still being built meaning the technology was part of the design of the building.

In November 2018, Aruba was chosen by the Ryder Cup to manage its vast network, winning out due to the flexibility and adaptability of its infrastructure, according to the competition's organisers. The network covered over 85 football pitches, comprised 700 access points, and 200 kilometres of fibre.

There are plenty of 802.11ax access points to choose from, but most of them are designed for indoor installation. EnGenius’ ECW260, however, brings the performance of Wi-Fi 6 into the great outdoors. Its innards are protected by an IP67-rated metal housing, so it should be more than up to the challenges of the British weather – it’s totally dust-tight and can even handle full immersion in a metre of water for 30 minutes.

As for technical capabilities, we’re looking at a dual-band AP claiming speeds of up to 1,200Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 574Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band. It connects back to your network through a 2.5GbE multi-Gigabit LAN port located behind the weatherproof grommet in its base; note that there’s no socket for an external power supply, so you’ll need a PoE+ power source.

The kit includes a sturdy metal bracket for wall mounting, with cut-outs allowing it to be placed on a pole using circular clamps. A heavy-duty grounding cable is provided too, along with self-tapping screws for dry walls, and the back of the AP has four standoff lugs to aid with cooling. The ECW260 is designed to be primarily cloud-managed, and to set it up you’ll need a free EnGenius Cloud account. This service allows you to manage any number of sites, or organisations, and all the cloud-enabled APs and switches contained within them.

Before adding APs to your account, it’s worth configuring your wireless networks first; these will then be pushed out automatically when your access points come online. Up to eight SSIDs per site are supported, and for each one you can decide which radios are active, choose whether to enforce WPA3 encryption, enable application analysis and apply rate limits for the entire SSID or per client.

One feature of the portal that’s particularly relevant to the ECW260 is the ability to set separate groups of settings to be applied to internal and external APs. You may notice, however, that you have little control over Wi-Fi 6 settings: you can choose whether to enable or disable 802.11ax support on selected radios, but that’s it.

For more control, EnGenius offers a chargeable Pro version of the cloud portal. Along with enhanced network topology views and wireless heatmaps, the timeline feature provides a seven-day view of all APs connected to by a specified client, along with the authentication methods used and details of association errors such as incorrect passwords.

EnGenius is working on an intriguing exposure-analysis tool too, which could be useful in these uncertain times. Developed as a contact-tracing aid, it lets you select a client from the portal and view all other users that associated with the same AP over a period of seven days. When the tool officially launches early in 2022 you’ll get the first year free, with ongoing pricing expected to be around £37 per device per year.

To register the AP you can enter the unit’s serial number in the portal, or use the Cloud To-Go iOS app to scan in the QR code on the base. We chose the latter option and the ECW260 was instantly added to our site; moments later it had received our wireless settings and was broadcasting the SSIDs. The cloud service also detected that our review unit was in need of a firmware upgrade, and automatically downloaded and applied it.

Although the ECW260 doesn’t support high-performance 160MHz channels, it delivered superb speeds in our real-world tests. Large file copies between a Windows 10 Pro workstation equipped with a TP-Link Archer TX3000E Wi-Fi 6 PCI-E adapter and a server on the LAN averaged a speedy 103MB/sec at close range, dropping to 82MB/sec when we moved the AP 20m away.

The EnGenius ECW260 is an excellent AP for any business wanting to extend Wi-Fi 6 services to an outdoor area. Its casing can handle most weather extremes, Wi-Fi 6 performance is very good and cloud-management services are beyond reproach.

EnGenius ECW260 specifications

DrayTek specialises in business-class networking at SMB-friendly prices, and the VigorAP 960C fits the bill perfectly. It offers impressive performance, thanks to dual-band Wi-Fi 6 radios, and also supports three operational modes and no fewer than four management modes – all for £163.

On its own, the 960C will work as either a standalone access point (AP) or a Wi-Fi 6 range extender for an existing network – or it can serve as part of a self-healing wireless mesh network. It can be managed from its own web console, auto-provisioned using any DrayTek router that supports the Central AP Management (CAM) feature, centrally administered with the free VigorConnect Windows app, or managed in the cloud with the optional VigorACS 3 service.

It's a slim thing, designed to be either ceiling or wall-mounted. Its single Gigabit Ethernet port supports PoE, although DrayTek also includes an external PSU in the box. Inside, twin radios promise data rates of up to 1,200Mbits/sec in the 5GHz band and 574Mbits/sec in the 2.4GHz band.

Deploying the AP in standalone mode is simple. The web console presents a wizard that guides you through changing the default password and creating your first wireless networks. Once the AP is running, the dashboard provides charts and graphs showing client connection details, overall traffic throughput, usage per SSID, AP hardware utilisation and a summary of all recent activity.

For advanced configurations, up to four SSIDs per radio are supported, with encryption options including the latest, strongest WPA3 standard. Further security features include LAN isolation, which stops wireless clients from accessing wired systems, and member isolation, which prevents wireless clients on the same SSID from seeing each other.

If you want to create a mesh network out of multiple APs, that's easy too. From the local web console, we ran the wizard again and this time selected the mesh option. We then powered on a second 960C AP and used the search facility to wirelessly discover and add it to the mesh. Up to seven supported APs can be configured as mesh nodes, and these can be located up to three hops away from the root, using wired or wireless connections – so there's potential to cover a large area.

Once added to the mesh, the nodes pick up your network settings from the primary unit and present a single set of centrally managed SSIDs. You can continue to manage the network from the root AP's web console, or use one of DrayTek's Wireless mobile apps. We tried the iOS app, which let us monitor both root and node AP status from an iPad – and a quick search facility helps you discover new nodes and add them to the mesh.

For desktop-based management, we installed the VigorConnect utility on a Windows 10 workstation, and found that it adds some useful extra tools. These include a quick-start wizard that discovers all available APs, and the option to enforce two-factor authentication (2FA) for maximum security.

Within the VigorConnect console, your entire site is managed as a root network, under which all APs appear; you can use profiles to customise specific settings and push them to selected units. Multiple dashboards provide plenty of information about wireless networks, and individual APs can have their operating mode changed with a couple of clicks.

Like most current Wi-Fi 6 equipment, the 960C doesn't support the ultrawide 160MHz channel option, but it still impressed us with its performance in our real-world tests. Large file copies between a Windows 10 Pro workstation with a TP-Link Archer TX3000E Wi-Fi 6 PCIe adapter and a server on the LAN averaged a speedy 103MB/sec at close range, dropping to 94MB/sec at 10m.

With three operating modes and a choice of four management methods, the VigorAP 960C is supremely versatile. Add great performance and a temptingly low price into the mix and you have the perfect next-generation wireless solution for SMBs.

DrayTek VigorAP 960C specifications

You may think living in the US means you enjoy the world's fastest internet speeds, but that's not the case. While those living in or around the city might get some great download speeds via fiber-optic connections, those in rural areas may only get a fraction of that speed — if they're lucky.

The US has an average internet download speed of 71.3 Mbps, making it the 20th fastest in the world, according to data from Worldwide Speed League.

The fastest Wi-Fi in the world relies on the fixed-line and mobile broadband connections a wireless router connects to.

If you have a router that connects to the internet via a mobile data connection and want the world's fastest Wi-Fi, you must travel to Qatar, where the average mobile data speeds top out at 178.01 Mbps – blazingly fast!

The United Arab Emirates is the country with the second-fastest internet at 177.52 Mbps, edging out South Korea, the third-fastest country at 169.03 Mbps.

If you have a Wi-Fi router connected to a fixed broadband line, you must head to Liechtenstein for the fastest Wi-Fi speeds in the world. Here, the average speed is 229.98 Mbps. The second-fastest broadband is Jersey at 218.37 Mbps, and third is Andorra at 213.41 Mbps.

The global average connection speeds fixed broadband come in at 24.83 Mbps.

The future of fast internet and Wi-Fi speeds

More Wi-Fi speed is all anyone on the internet wants, so scientists are coming up with various ways to ensure everyone has access to the fastest Wi-Fi speeds.

Researchers from Monash, Swinburne, and RMIT universities successfully tested and recorded internet speeds of 4.2 Terabits per second (Tbps) from a single light source. At that speed, you could download 1,000 high-definition movies in under a second.

Better still, researchers managed to achieve these speeds not in a lab but with existing communications infrastructure where they could efficiently load-test the network. The researchers replaced 80 lasers typically used in fiber-optic equipment with a "micro-comb" device to achieve these speeds.

A team at University College London (UCL) quickly dwarfed this feat. Working with two companies, Xtera and KDDI Research, the Dr. Lidia Galdino-led UCL research team achieved a data transmission rate of 178 Tbps. With this speed, you could download the entire Netflix library in under a second.

UCL achieved the record by transmitting data through a much wider range of colors of light, or wavelengths, than is typically used in optical fiber.

Will speeds get any faster than this? According to UCL, the speed is close to the theoretical limit of data transmission set out by American mathematician Claude Shannon in 1949.

Getting the fastest Wi-Fi speeds in the world in your home

Most of us with home Wi-Fi have wireless routers that use 802.11ac for wireless connectivity. This technology arrived in 2013 and supports up to 7 Gbps, which is its theoretical maximum. This tech is a souped-up version of its predecessor 802.11n, which could only manage 600 Mbps.

However, new wireless technology has come to pass that can genuinely offer the world's fastest Wi-Fi speeds at home. Called Wi-Fi 6 — or 802.11ax to its close friends — the technology can reach speeds of 9.6 Gbps.

It offers better speeds through more efficient data encoding, resulting in higher throughput because it packs more data into the same radio waves. The technology even works on 2.4 GHz networks. This means faster speeds will be available to "punch through" solid objects that 5 GHz can't, such as brick or concrete walls.

But Wi-Fi 6 isn't just about providing the fastest Wi-Fi speeds in the world or at home, it's about offering homes the ability to connect more devices. When 802.11ac came out, the average U.S. household had about five wireless devices in the home. That figure is now about nine. Within the next few years, experts predict each home will have 50 wireless devices connected.

Each connected device can severely impact the Wi-Fi speeds you experience. Wi-Fi 6 has technologies to help mitigate the problems created by having multiple devices on the network.

One such technology Wi-Fi 6 has is Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), which divides a wireless channel into many subchannels. Each subchannel can carry data intended for a different device, allowing the Wi-Fi access point to talk to more devices at once.

According to Intel, Wi-Fi 6 will improve a user's average speed by "at least four times" in crowded areas with many connected devices.

Even faster Wi-Fi

It doesn't stop at Wi-Fi 6, though. For the fastest Wi-Fi speeds in the world, Wi-Fi 6E may take the crown. This is an extension of the technology that promises to reduce Wi-Fi congestion further and boost everyone's speeds.

As mentioned previously, Wi-Fi 6 can use 2.4 and 5 GHz radio bands. Wi-Fi 6E uses the 6 GHz spectrum, allowing for 14 additional 80 MHz channels and seven additional 160 MHz channels, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance. These channels wouldn't overlap each other, which will help reduce congestion and boost speeds.

Currently, for Wi-Fi 6E to become available, regulators will have to allow devices to use this part of the spectrum. However, there's no official timeline for when the 6 GHz spectrum will become available for unlicensed use. But when it does, we should expect to see vendors launching devices that use the standard soon after.

Additional tips to speed up your in-home Wi-Fi

If you can't wait until standards such as Wi-Fi 6 become the norm, there are several ways the average household can boost Wi-Fi speeds.

• Clear the memory: As with all IT problems, one of the easiest ways to boost speed is to go to the router and turn it off and on again. This resets the internal memory, giving it a fresh start.
• Location matters: Another way is to move the router to a better location. wireless signals can get blocked by walls, floors ceilings, furniture, appliances, and any large physical objects. Don't hide the router away in a cupboard, the door makes getting signals through a lot more difficult. Put the router in a central location near where you use your computers the most.
• Antenna positioning: If your router has antennae, adjust them to send out signals toward most of your wireless devices. Also, check the wireless channel your router uses, it probably is the same as others in the neighborhood. Find a channel that isn't used as much as the others. To find the best Wi-Fi channel, you can use the Wireless Diagnostics feature on a Mac computer. On a Windows PC, Windows apps, such as NetSpot, can recommend the best Wi-Fi channels to use.
• Create a mesh network: Mesh networking devices can work together to create a Wi-Fi network covering your whole home from different places in your house. Powerline extenders can also bring the internet into places where your router can't; you just need an unused power socket.
• Update your router or connection: If nothing else works to boost your Wi-Fi speed, replace your old router with a more up-to-date model that can handle multiple connections and higher broadband speeds. You can also contact your internet service provider (ISP) to see if they can offer something with more speed, like full fiber connectivity.

EnGenius was an early entrant into the SMB Wi-Fi 6 market, making a splash with the temptingly affordable EWS357AP. The ECW230 costs nearly £140 more, but the extra cash brings faster wireless performance.

Indeed, on paper you're getting double the speed, as the ECW230's AX3600 rating combines a top speed of 2,400Mbits/sec on the 5GHz band and 1,148Mbits/sec over 2.4GHz. To allow you to make the most of that performance, it sports a 2.5GbE multi-Gigabit LAN port – and this is also how you're expected to power it, although if you don't have a PoE+ source you can buy a separate power supply and plug it into the adjacent power socket. For testing, we used EnGenius' ECS2512FP model, which provides 802.3bt PoE++ on all 2.5GbE ports and can also be cloud-managed.

For managing the AP itself, the ECW230 presents a basic web browser interface, which provides the LAN, internet and cloud connection status – but it's really designed to work as part of a cloud-managed fleet of APs. We registered the ECW230 to our cloud account in seconds, using the Cloud To-Go iOS app on an iPad to scan in the QR code on its base. The AP then automatically joined our organisation, picked up our wireless settings and started broadcasting them as soon as it was online.

The cloud portal opens with a standard dashboard; you can't customise this, but it provides a good range of metrics, with graphs showing wireless throughput for all switches, APs and wireless clients, plus details of top APs, clients and SSIDs. A Layer 7 traffic-analysis graph also reveals the top ten detected applications, along with upload and download bandwidth usage.

Up to eight SSIDs per site are supported, and for each one you can pick which radios are active, enable band steering and fast roaming, and set rate limits, either for the entire SSID or on a per-client basis. WPA3 encryption is supported along with the older WPA2 standard, and the clever MyPSK service allows you to automatically generate unique WPA keys for particular users or groups.

Alternatively, you can enable a captive portal for particular SSIDs, and use a range of other authentication methods including cloud user ID, radius, voucher and Facebook account login. A splash page can be displayed to users too, and the cloud portal's integrated HTML editor makes it easy to customise this with your own logo, welcome message and acceptable use policy.

Upgrading to the paid-for Pro version of the cloud portal gets you some additional security measures: the client timeline provides a seven-day view of all the APs each device has associated with and the authentication methods used, while the exposure-analysis tool – originally developed as a contact-tracing aid during the pandemic – tracks other users who recently associated with the same AP.

When it comes to Wi-Fi 6 settings there's, as usual, almost nothing to configure. You just get a switch to enable or disable 802.11ax on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, although EnGenius goes further than most by allowing separate settings for indoor and outdoor APs.

The ECW230 also doesn't support the 160MHz channel width, but performance is still pretty good. Over a Wi-Fi 5 link, large file copies to and from a Windows 10 Pro desktop equipped with a Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 USB adapter were completed at 77MB/sec at close range and 72MB/sec from 10m away. That's better than the EWS357AP, which averaged 69MB/sec and 65MB/sec respectively – but well short of TP-Link's Omada EAP660 HD, which delivered record-breaking speeds of 105MB/sec and 96MB/sec.

If your focus is on performance, therefore, the ECW230 probably won't be your first choice, and it's certainly not the cheapest Wi-Fi 6 AP around. Even so, EnGenius' cloud portal offers a superb range of business-class wireless management and security features that make this AP well worth a look.

EnGenius ECW230 specifications

Hewlett Packard Enterprise-owned Aruba Networks has announced a new offering to help businesses unlock Wi-Fi's full potential.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opened the 6GHz band, the largest expansion of Wi-Fi capacity in nearly two decades, for unlicensed use in April 2020. Since then, 39 countries, including the US, have tapped the 6GHz band to support Wi-Fi 6E devices.

"Currently, as organizations increase their use of bandwidth-hungry video, cope with increasing numbers of client and IoT devices connecting to their networks, and speed up their transition to cloud, the demand for Wi-Fi continues to rise. As a result, wireless networks are becoming oversubscribed, throttling application performance," said Aruba.

To help organizations meet the mounting bandwidth demand, Aruba has unveiled an industry-first Wi-Fi 6E solution set, dubbed Aruba 630 Series Access Points, with comprehensive tri-band coverage across 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz.

The Aruba 630 Series APs is built on Aruba's cloud-native edge services platform (ESP) that analyzes data across domains in real-time, tracks anomalies, and self-optimizes while providing visibility into unknown devices.

The new solution offers up to seven 160MHz channels in 6GHz with 3.9Gbps maximum aggregate data throughput to better support low-latency, high-bandwidth services and applications, including high-definition video, augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR), internet of things (IoT), and cloud.

Two 2.5Gbps HPE Smart Rate ethernet ports offer hitless failover from one port to another for data and power, ensuring business continuity at all times. Additionally, the 630 Series APs adhere to WPA3 and Enhanced Open protocols for‌‌ ‌superior‌‌ ‌‌encryption‌‌‌ ‌‌‌and‌‌‌ ‌‌‌authentication.

"Consumer appetite for ubiquitous wireless connectivity is limitless, whether at home or traveling the world," said Mike Kuehn, president at Astronics CSC.

"As a leading global provider of advanced technologies for the aerospace and defense industries – including some of the largest major airlines in the world – Aruba's new Wi-Fi 6E AP gives us the ability to offer compelling and unique solutions that deliver a new, enhanced and more secure wireless experience to our customers."

The Orbi RBK352 is Netgear’s new, low-cost Wi-Fi 6 mesh system. At least, it’s low cost compared to the company’s previous Wi-Fi 6 mesh offerings. The high-end Orbi RBK852 system is £645 for a two-node kit, while the mid-range RBK752 will set you back £450. The RBK352, by contrast, starts at £195, making it a viable competitor to many Wi-Fi 5 mesh systems.

Inevitably, though, the price cut comes with a trade-off. The RBK352 hardware isn’t as powerful as its premium brethren, and that has an impact on real-world performance. In particular, it’s a dual-band system. Each unit contains a 2.4GHz radio rated at 600Mbits/sec and a 5GHz radio with a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 1,200Mbits/sec. That’s a decent chunk of bandwidth but, since there’s no third radio, this has to be shared between client and backhaul traffic.

As with all Wi-Fi 6 gear, the RBK352 is backward-compatible with Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) clients, but it won’t interoperate with Wi-Fi 5 Orbi units. It’s technically possible to mix and match RBK352 nodes with satellites from an RBK752 or RBK852 kit, but the performance limitations of the RBK352 will still apply to the client devices connected to it.

Netgear Orbi RBK352 review: Design

The Orbi RBK352 is designed to completely replace your existing router, although if your internet connection requires you to keep your ISP router in place you can still use the Orbi in access point (AP) mode, or in a double-NAT configuration.

With a curved, off-white design, the RBK352 units are unmistakably of the Orbi clan. They’re the babies of the family, though, standing only 178mm tall with a footprint of 145 x 61mm. We don’t mind this at all because it means that you can situate them inconspicuously wherever you like, which can’t be said of the looming RBK852 units.

We’re also pleased to see that wired connectivity hasn’t been cut down too far. Orbi systems never support USB, but the primary unit has three Gigabit Ethernet sockets next to the WAN connector, with each satellite sporting a further two. That’s a definite advantage over the similarly priced TP-Link Deco X20, whose main router unit only has a single Ethernet port spare once you’ve hooked up the other one to your internet connection.

We miss the big, obvious status lights of other Orbi designs, though. The RBK352’s discreet LED means it’s far less obvious when a node is booting up or in an error state.

Netgear Orbi RBK352 review: Ports and features

We used the Android app to set up the RBK352 system, and found it almost foolproof. There’s a clunky moment when you have to jump into your phone’s Wi-Fi settings to manually connect to the Orbi network, then find your way back into the Orbi app to continue the setup process – but there’s not much Netgear can do about that. At any rate, it’s a process you’ll probably only go through once.

From then on you can use either the smartphone app or the web portal to manage your mesh. It’s a clear and responsive app with a familiar set of features from previous Orbi devices, including Netgear’s distinctive inbound VPN service; this makes it easy to access your home servers and clients over the internet. As usual, integration with Alexa and the Google Assistant allows you to control the guest network and reboot the router with your voice and you can enable Netgear’s Armor network security module too, which adds vulnerability scans and malicious site blocking. The $70-per-year subscription is steep given TP-Link’s equivalent HomeCare service is free, but Netgear’s offering includes Bitdefender Security software for all the clients in your household.

There are a few key omissions. No USB sockets means no file or printer sharing and, as usual with Orbi systems, there’s no band-splitting option, meaning your 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks appear under a single combined SSID.

For some reason, Netgear also doesn’t currently offer its Circle parental controls on Wi-Fi 6 mesh systems. These could be added in a future firmware update, but for the time being you’ll have to make do with the (quite sophisticated) website-filtering feature, which lets you block specific keywords and domain names for specific clients according to a custom schedule. You can’t filter sites by category, however, as you can on the TP-Link Deco X20.

Netgear Orbi RBK352 review: Performance

Only having a single radio 5GHz is normally bad news for a mesh system. However, the RBK352’s rating of 1,200Mbits/sec is theoretically fast enough to download a full gigabyte of data in under seven seconds. So it all comes down to real-world performance.

We tested this in a residential premises, with the primary Orbi unit located at the front of the house. The secondary node was placed at the opposite end of the adjacent room, while the third was positioned in the room below. We then carried a 2020 HP Elite Dragonfly laptop, equipped with an internal Wi-Fi 6 network card, to various rooms of the building and measured upload and download speeds to a NAS appliance connected to the primary Orbi RBK352 node via Gigabit Ethernet.

Even with the benefit of an additional satellite, the dual-band RBK352 couldn’t keep up with the tri-band Orbi systems. It isn’t as fast as the Asus ZenWiFi AX, either; while the Netgear system was faster in the rooms closest to the primary router, the Asus’ performance held up better as we moved further away, which is, of course, the whole point of a mesh.

Within its own price category, however, the RBK352 holds up well. It dropped a smidge behind the TP-Link Deco X20 in the living room, but proved notably quicker in the adjacent room. Everywhere in the building, the test laptop switched seamlessly between nodes to keep the connection fast and stable, and with download speeds never falling below 20MB/sec, we see no reason to complain.

These performance figures do come with a few caveats, however. If you have clients dotted around the building that are all exchanging data over the Orbi network, it might mean that a lot of backhaul data has to be passed back and forth between nodes, which will reduce the amount of bandwidth available for your streams and downloads.

Things get worse if you’re still using Wi-Fi 5 clients. The last-gen standard quickly gets bogged down when multiple clients want to talk at once, causing performance to drop off further. This affects all Wi-Fi 5 routers and meshes, but the RBK352 with its dual-band design is likely to suffer particularly acutely.

Netgear Orbi RBK352 review: Verdict

The Orbi RBK352 does what it promises. The units are unobtrusive but offer decent connectivity, and the software is as good as you’ll get from any Orbi system. Compared with Netgear’s previous forays into the Wi-Fi 6 mesh market, the price is tempting, too.

However, if you’re being drawn in by the RBK352’s comparatively low price, it’s worth exploring whether an even cheaper solution will do what you need: we found that the Honor Router 3 served up at least 16MB/sec all around our three-bedroom, two-storey premises for only £67. Conversely, if you’re keen to enjoy the full performance of Wi-Fi 6 then this budget-conscious system won’t get you all the way there.

Even within the very narrow arena of affordable dual-band Wi-Fi 6 mesh systems, the RBK352 isn’t the only candidate to consider. The TP-Link Deco X20 is short on network ports, and has no equivalent to the Orbi’s VPN server, but it does come with proper parental controls, and the free network security module is a significant bonus.

Ultimately, the decision must come down to your personal priorities and budget. However, while we can’t say the RBK352 is right for everyone, we can tell you that what you see is what you get – that being a likeable and user-friendly mesh system. If that inspires you to get your wallet out, you won’t be disappointed.

Netgear Orbi RBK352 specifications

Satellite specifications

Wi-Fi 6 is gaining momentum in business networks, and if you’re ready to upgrade then TP-Link’s Omada EAP660 HD access point (AP) is a classy way to do it. It’s a dual-band AP that can be fully cloud-managed and promises excellent speeds of up to 2,402Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 1,148Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band. Its 2.5GbE LAN port supports either PoE or PoE+, but for those who don’t have an available power source, there’s an external PSU in the box.

If you’re deploying the EAP660 HD in standalone mode, the web console has you covered: the quick-start wizard walks you through setting up admin access and configuring your first two SSIDs, out of a maximum of eight per radio.

For cloud management, TP-Link takes a similar tack to Ubiquiti Networks, focusing on software-defined networks. Each site to be managed requires an Omada cloud controller: TP-Link provides the controller software as a free download for Windows and Linux, or you can buy a preconfigured hardware appliance running the Linux version.

For testing, we used the OC300 model, which costs around £107. We were also supplied with TP-Link’s JetStream TL-SG2428P Gigabit PoE+ switch, which was spotted by the controller and added to its managed devices list. Frankly, though, if you’re kitting out a network we wouldn’t recommend this particular switch, as it doesn’t support the full bandwidth of the AP’s 2.5GbE port – the TL-SG3210XHP-M2 would be a better choice.

Available controllers can be viewed from the cloud portal, and selecting one transports you to the relevant management console, from which you can set up your site SSIDs. All APs on a site present all SSIDs, so clients can connect to the nearest one and roam between them as they move around.

Each SSID can support both WPA2 and the stronger WPA3 encryption, with optional upload and download rate limits. If you designate a particular SSID as a guest network, clients only get internet access, and captive portals can be enabled with custom pictures, logos and policy statements. Authentication can be enforced by simple password, local user, voucher, Radius or Facebook. The one thing you won’t find is any Wi-Fi 6-specific settings to play with – this side of things is all handled in the background,

Adding the EAP660 HD to our site was all but effortless. After we’d plugged the AP into the switch, it promptly appeared in the controller’s console as “pending”. From here it was a matter of a few clicks to adopt it, after which it disabled its local web interface and took all wireless settings from the controller.

As well as wireless configuration, the web interface provides a customisable dashboard showing useful information such as wireless summaries, client distribution, most active clients and wireless traffic. There are options to monitor internet capacity and usage too, but these require a SafeStream VPN gateway fronting your site network.

As is usual for APs in this price range, the EAP660 HD doesn’t support ultrawide 160MHz channels, but it still mustered a very creditable performance in our Wi-Fi tests. Large file copies between a Windows 10 Pro desktop equipped with a Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 802.11ac USB adapter and a server on the LAN averaged 105MB/sec at close range and 96MB/sec at 10m. That top number isn’t far off the maximum throughput of the supplied Gigabit switch, and makes this one of the best-performing business APs we’ve seen.

The Omada EAP660 HD is a great choice for SMBs that want top-performing wireless networks at a fair price. It’s fast, simple to deploy, offers plenty of business features and can be easily cloud managed using your choice of hardware or software controllers.

TP-Link Omada EAP660 HD specifications

Alexandra Palace was never built with Wi-Fi in mind. This may seem like an obvious point to make, given the Grade II listed venue first opened its doors in 1873. The building’s nature, however, proved a challenge with which the venue’s IT department wrestled at every turn as it made efforts to modernise its networking infrastructure.

For years, the stunning Victorian-era North London entertainment destination has struggled to adequately cater to Wi-Fi-hungry audiences flocking to gigs and exhibits. Although Alexandra Palace, or Ally Pally as it’s affectionately known, has offered free Wi-Fi services for years, its IT manager Nick Johnson tells IT Pro this technology was old and in desperate need of reinvigoration. With coverage patchy, the venue also struggled to keep up with the increasingly digital nature of events, while in some instances falling short of security and compliance standards.

“The biggest issue, for me, was the visibility of the network,” Johnson tells IT Pro. “We almost had none.” It was unlike modern systems in that, for example, it wasn’t overseen by network controllers, meaning there was no way of seeing who, or what, was connected to the network. Given its capacity of roughly 15,000 people, including a standing capacity of 10,250 in its Great Hall, this posed a significant risk. “We needed to know who was plugging into our network both from a security point of view and … [to] try to be proactive on avoiding network issues.”

Starting from the ground-up

Much of the networking hardware installed across Alexandra Palace was reaching end-of-life, and unable to cope with a recent surge in mobile devices and greater demand for Wi-Fi services. The picture Johnson paints is one of a venue unable to keep up with the new demand for digital, which was unacceptable to those in charge, who pride themselves on the venue’s history of being at the forefront of technology.

A former networking engineer, Johnson was hired in 2019 to lead an on-site IT department, which the venue lacked prior to his appointment. His main role was to bring everything back in-house and solve the major IT issues Ally Pally was facing on a daily basis. The challenges were steeper than he’d expected, however, as he realised the facility had never properly tracked its networking infrastructure in a formalised way. Moves and changes over the years, which could be as minor as swapping out a switch, weren’t recorded, meaning what he had at hand was the networking map for a completely different system to that he could see with his own eyes. As a result, he spent his early days preparing fresh documentation from scratch while auditing the breadth of the system to pinpoint where the main issues lay. This process, he says, was akin to starting from the ground-up.

The result was at least a month of extra work mapping out 40 to 50 networking cabinets and the physical cabling tying everything together. Alarmingly, during that process, he encountered one or two areas that fell short of “good practice”, including cables that were on their way out, or building management systems (BMS) crossed over to networks they had no business being attached to. More urgently, some portions of the Wi-Fi network didn’t meet PCI compliance standards, which posed a problem for accepting card payments.

“The only thing I wish we had was more documentation,” he says. “I think the process could’ve been a lot quicker if we had managed that, and I think a lot of small SMBs often overlook the importance of things like documentation. But in the long run, it would’ve saved us time and money and potentially gave us some awareness of some of the issues we would’ve faced.”

“A couple of our walls are four, five feet thick”

Revamping Alexandra Palace’s networks was a key priority following Johnson’s appointment, and the venue also recruited Performance Networks to assist in this project. Although a few organisations were in the running, Johnson opted for the expertise of the Nottingham-based company, explaining the team “completely understood” when he spoke with them. It also helped that they came highly recommended by an IT manager at another venue.

They fired the starting gun on the implementation just before the pandemic, and completed the works last September. Although working through COVID-19 initially seemed daunting, it actually proved to be a blessing in disguise. “We’re hardly ever empty,” Johnson explains. “We’ve got events on all-year-round. A lot of them have run into late at night, so just from an IT point of view it’s really difficult to manage any kind of infrastructure project that doesn’t directly affect an event or core function.”

The implementation was far from smooth-sailing, however with perhaps the most obvious potential hitch being Alexandra Palace’s 215ft telecommunications mast used by mobile carriers and other firms. This mast has long-rendered the venue a dead zone for mobile phone signal, raising concerns it would hamper Wi-Fi coverage. The more Johnson’s team looked into it, however, the less of an impact they realised it would have, which was “a real relief”. Also tricky to navigate was the building’s nature, with many portions being Grade II listed. “One of the major issues with Wi-Fi is that [Alexandra Palace] is 150 years old, so the density of the walls and the materials used in construction were completely different from almost any build nowadays,” Johnson explains. “A couple of our walls are four or five feet thick, so you can imagine that Wi-Fi doesn’t travel through [them]. So we needed to take that into account.”

With that in mind, changing the aesthetics of Alexandra Palace was the last thing they wanted to do, which meant finding ways to turn the networking hardware “almost invisible”. They couldn’t just attach things to walls and ceilings as they wished, so instead aimed to utilise the building to their advantage to overcome this. For example, instead of attaching components to walls, they used rigging in the main hall. They also had to be creative with the hardware in use, such as using a varied combination of internal and external directional antennae around the building, depending on the requirements of the particular space. This is alongside ordering bespoke brackets to mount components in such a way that it wouldn’t affect the structure but still allowed full coverage.

Fit for the future

To compound these difficulties, the nature of the building meant they had to approach each room in a completely different way, treating these areas almost like separate sites. “It’s such a dynamic venue,” Johnson says. “We host all sorts of events and meetings and conferences in just about every space of the venue. They all cater for different people, for different needs.” In that sense, he adds, there was a really granular look at every room, with room-by-room installations designed around the physical restrictions for each location, as well as what these microvenues could be used for.

While this approach was arduous, the result of having gone through it means the venue has opened itself up to an array of new opportunities. With reliable Wi-Fi signal across all nooks and crannies of the Victorian-era building, coupled with stronger performance and higher bandwidth, Johnson speculates that Alexandra Palace could even tap into the growing realm of hybrid events. While the venue hasn’t normally focussed on virtual conferences, it can now cater for more tech-focussed exhibitions, which wouldn’t have been previously possible. Looking ahead, he adds Alexandra Palace will hope to improve its cyber security posture, as well as exploring cloud technologies to a much higher degree.

As for the networking overhaul, the proof will be in the pudding, and Johnson is itching to test out the new system with at-capacity crowds as soon as COVID-19 restrictions lift. Alexandra Palace hosted smaller events towards the end of 2020, but the capacity for these numbered 600 maximum. While the new system worked seamlessly, it barely had to break a sweat, and these trials told them relatively little about how it might cope with thousands upon thousands of users logging in at once. The plan, from the live first event, will see Johnson’s team and Performance Networks colleagues come together once again to monitor performance, while making any necessary tweaks there and then, as required. “We’ve tested it as much as we could,” he adds, “but I think the only way to test it is to wait and see.”

You can pay an awful lot for a Wi-Fi 6 router. Premium models nudge close to £400 and mesh systems can cost even more. So while the £280 Nighthawk RAX80 is expensive, it’s not outlandishly so for a high-end Wi-Fi 6 solution.

And for the money, you get something that’s visibly a cut above the mainstream. The silver-grey casing with its upturned wings makes a definite statement, and round the back sit not four but five LAN ports, of which the leftmost pair can be aggregated for a 2GbE connection.

The rear panel also hosts a pair of 5Gbits/sec USB 3 ports, while WPS and Wi-Fi buttons sit on the top, next to a string of 11 tiny LEDs showing activity on your LAN ports, wireless connections and more. These are so discreet that you may need to walk up and stand directly over the router to see if there’s an error, but the overall impression is undeniably suave.

It must be said that this cool impression is, in our view, somewhat undermined by the clunky web portal. Getting set up is a breeze: the wizard walks you through a few steps of getting online and choosing your network settings, and then you’re done. Beyond that, though, we found the interface ugly and confusing to navigate, with excessive white space and nested frames that make it easy to miss important settings and buttons. It’s perhaps telling that Netgear encourages you to use the cleaner Nighthawk smartphone app instead – but we’d really like to see the web portal fixed rather than deprecated.

The range of features isn’t entirely comprehensive, either. Netgear’s basic QoS controls don’t allow you to give selected devices priority over others, and although it’s nice to have twin USB ports, their usefulness is limited by the fact that they won’t accept printers or USB modems.

On top of that, you have to pay extra to fully unlock the RAX80’s capabilities. Netgear’s Circle app lets you monitor users behaviour and block certain types of website for free, but if you want to apply time limits you’ll need to pay $50 a year for the Circle Premium service. Activating the Netgear Armor network security module adds another $70 per annum, but that includes Bitdefender security software for your whole user group.

On the plus side, the RAX80 shines when it comes to remote access. A full VPN server is included with dynamic DNS integration, giving you an easy way of accessing your local network over the internet, while Netgear’s ReadyCLOUD service lets you share your USB storage over the web.

And then there’s performance. The radios are as fast as any on the market, with quoted speeds of 1,200Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band and up to 4,800Mbits/sec at 5GHz. There’s 4x4 MIMO on both bands too, although oddly we found that MU-MIMO was turned off by default and had to be manually enabled.

That’s a strong spec and it delivered on its potential in our Wi-Fi 6 speed tests. As we carted our test laptop around the building, the RAX80 consistently delivered the fastest download speeds of any router in its class. In most areas, the RAX80 even managed to outshine multi-node mesh kits, and while it couldn’t quite maintain its winning streak all the way to the bathroom, its worst result was still a very swift 31.5MB/sec.

Things weren’t quite so rosy when we switched to our older Wi-Fi 5 laptop. The RAX80 once again provided superb speeds in the study and living room, but data rates dropped by more than half when we went into the bedroom – and then halved again in the kitchen, finally sinking to a mediocre 3.9MB/sec in the bathroom. This isn’t unusably slow by any means, but it might be a reason to consider other options if you’re not in a hurry to replace your last-generation devices.

At the end of the day, though, buying a Wi-Fi 6 router is about looking forward not back, and from that perspective the RAX80 is unequivocally a winner. Its performance over 802.11ax is simply the best around, outpacing routers costing £100 more, and that comes combined with easy setup, a good set of ports and a striking physical design.

Netgear Nighthawk RAX80 specifications

Verizon has recalled 2.5 million mobile hotspot devices because their lithium-ion batteries can overheat, causing a fire hazard.

Verizon sold the Ellipsis Jetpack hotspot from April 2017 through March 2021. A U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission recall notice noted some schools distributed these faulty hotspots to remote-learning students.

These are dark navy plastic oval devices, about 3.5 inches wide and 2.25 inches tall, with “Verizon” printed below the digital display window on the front of the device.

The models in question are labeled MHS900L, MHS900LS and MHS900LPP. You can find the identifying numbers on a sticker on each device’s charging wire.

Verizon has received 15 reports of the hotspots overheating, according to a recall notice from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Two incidents resulted in minor burns, and six involved fire damage to bedding or flooring.

Verizon pushed out a software update to powered-on hotspots that prevents them from charging while powered on, reducing the overheating risk.

The company also suggested best practices to prevent overheating in all devices, including turning them off when they’re not in use; putting them on a flat, solid surface like a floor or table; making sure nothing is covering them; keeping the devices near room temperature when they’re in use; and not exposing them to extreme temperatures for long periods.

“The safety of our customers is our highest priority,” Verizon said. “We are taking the situation very seriously, and we are working diligently to determine the cause of the issues with the supplier and to provide replacement devices for all of our customers, free of charge.”

Parents who received hotspots from their children’s schools are advised to contact the schools about getting replacements. Others can request a replacement by going to ellipsisjetpackrecall.expertinquiry.com or calling (855) 205-2627.

Netgear’s business-class Wi-Fi 6 access points (APs) may have come a little late to the next-gen wireless party, but what an entrance: for only £130 exc VAT, the WAX610 combines 802.11ax technology with full cloud management and support for wireless mesh networks.

Like most APs, it’s a dual-band design, claiming connection speeds of up to 1,200Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 600Mbits/sec over 2.4GHz. A single 2.5GbE LAN port is set into the rear alongside a power socket – although there’s no power supply included because the expectation is that you’ll use PoE.

For basic Wi-Fi services, you can deploy the WAX610 in standalone mode and use its local web console to manage it. For larger offices, Netgear’s Insight cloud portal is more appealing, as it can administer multiple wireless networks from one cloud console, along with any Insight-enabled NAS appliances, switches and routers. It isn’t free, but the price of the WAX610 includes a one-year subscription to the Insight Premium service, with subsequent years costing £10 per device. There’s also an Insight Pro tier, costing £25 per device, which is aimed mainly at service providers that want to assign user roles and rights, as well as manage multiple organisations from the same account.

Setting up the WAX610 is a cinch. After installing the Netgear Insight iOS app on an iPad, we were able to add the AP to our cloud account by simply scanning its QR code and assigning it to an existing Insight site.

If you haven’t previously defined your network settings, you can set them up now. Insight supports up to eight SSIDs per site, using both WPA2 and the stronger WPA3 encryption. For each one you can decide which radios should be active, apply rate limits, set availability schedules and enable features such as load balancing and fast roaming. For guest networks, you can enable captive portals with custom logos and acceptable use policies. All of these settings are automatically picked up and applied as soon as you plug in the WAX610.

On the subject of plugging in, note that the AP can be used with regular PoE, but we strongly recommend that you use a PoE+ source – otherwise, Wi-Fi performance may be reduced by up to 40%. To accommodate the WAX610’s full bandwidth, you might also want to use a multi-Gigabit switch; we connected an EnGenius ECS2512FP, which provides 802.3bt PoE++ on all its 2.5GbE ports.

The Insight portal provides plenty of details about network activity, including details of site traffic, APs, SSIDs, connected clients and detected OSes. From the wireless page, you can view data usage for each AP, check channel utilisation, see radio usage and track how much traffic your clients are generating.

There is, however, almost nothing in the way of Wi-Fi 6 settings – only an option to toggle 802.11ax mode on or off. And, like most low-cost APs, the WAX610 doesn’t support high-bandwidth 160MHz channels at all.

Even so, we had no complaints about performance. Large-file copies between a Windows 10 Pro desktop equipped with a Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 802.11ac USB adapter and a server on the LAN were completed at average speeds of 77MB/sec at close range and 70MB/sec at 10m. These are slightly better numbers than we saw from Aruba’s Instant On AP22 Wi-Fi 6 AP, which gave speeds of 74MB/sec and 67MB/sec respectively.

Taking advantage of the WAX610’s mesh support couldn’t be easier – just power up your additional APs within range of a root AP, without cabling them to the same network. After we’d added one of Netgear’s WAX610Y outdoor APs to our Insight account, it automatically connected to the WAX610 on the 5GHz radio band and created a mesh with it.

The WAX610 brings Wi-Fi 6 to small businesses at a price they’ll love. It’s easy to deploy and delivers good performance, while the Insight portal provides slick all-round management and visibility of your wireless networks.

Netgear WAX610 specifications

The latest Wi-Fi 6 access points may be all the rage right now, but many businesses will find Wi-Fi 5 models can deliver most of the features they need at more affordable prices. Costing a shade over £100, TP-Link’s Omada EAP265 HD exemplifies this, offering a good turn of wireless speed, plus a wealth of business-class features and free cloud management into the bargain.

The EAP265 HD is an AC1750 dual-band AP delivering speeds of up to 1,300Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 450Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz radio. Its first Gigabit port supports a PoE or PoE+ source - but worry not if you don’t have one, as TP-Link generously includes a passive Gigabit PoE injector and UK plug lead in the box.

It also has a second Gigabit port which can be used to connect other wired devices and provide them with network access, and it can be wall or ceiling-mounted. The kit thoughtfully includes a sturdy plastic ‘twist and lock’ bracket for this purpose.

The EAP265 HD is almost identical to TP-Link’s cheaper EAP245 though, so what exactly are the differences? We suspect the ‘HD’ in its model name stands for ‘high density’, as it can handle up to a whopping 500 clients, whereas the EAP245 is certified up to a comparatively paltry 220.

TP-Link Omada EAP265 HD review: Standalone mode and performance

Deploying the EAP265 HD in standalone mode is a speedy process. The web console’s quick start wizard just required us to supply a new username and password, after which it sensibly removed the default admin account. The AP supports up to eight SSIDs per radio, and the wizard offers the opportunity to configure the first ones for each radio before securing them with a new encryption key.

The web console itself is a simple affair that presents a status page showing CPU and memory utilization, all wireless networks, tables of inbound and outbound traffic and lists of connected clients. Each SSID can have their own authentication scheme (which doesn’t include WPA3), upload and download rate limits and guest designation which keeps wireless clients away from the local network.

A built-in scheduler controls when the AP or its SSIDs are active, QoS (quality of service) can be applied to voice and video traffic and if you create two identical SSIDs for each radio, you can enable band steering. Guest networks present custom captive portals with an acceptable use policy (AUP) and optional redirection but authentication only extends to a local global password or Radius server.

Real world performance is surprisingly good; large file copies from a Windows 10 desktop equipped with a Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 11ac USB adapter to a server on the LAN averaged 80.5MB/sec at close range and only dropped to 74MB/sec at 10 metres. You won’t see much more oomph than this, though, as the AP’s web console showed CPU utilisation hovering around 96% during our tests.

TP-Link Omada EAP265 HD review: Cloud management

TP-Link takes a similar approach to cloud management as Ubiquiti Networks, where each site requires a local controller that links up with your free cloud portal account. You can host the controller yourself (free versions are provided for Windows and Linux platforms) but for testing, we employed TP-Link’s OC300 controller appliance which runs the Linux version and costs around £107.

We went the whole hog and added TP-Link’s SafeStream TL-R605 router and JetStream TL-SG2428P Gigabit PoE+ switch. With the router fronting our test network, we connected the switch to one of its LAN ports and plugged the OC300 and EAP265 HD into the switch.

Starting with the OC300, we used its local web console wizard to assign it to our cloud account and during this process, it picked up the switch and added it as a managed device. All controllers are presented in the cloud portal and selecting one provides remote access to its local web console.

Provisioning the EAP265 HD is a cinch. It appears in the controller’s console as ‘pending’, and once it has been ‘adopted’, it disables its local web interface and receives all wireless settings from the controller. From this point on, any site SSIDs you create will be automatically pushed out to all managed APs.

TP-Link Omada EAP265 HD review: Cloud features

Moving to cloud management provides a wealth of site information, with the customizable portal dashboard presenting a ribbon across the top showing internet capacity, gateway usage, switches, APs, clients and guests. Below this, you can create your own views and choose from a wide range of graphical widgets such as wireless summaries, client distributions, wireless traffic and the most active clients.

Features for the EAP265 HD get a boost too, as site SSIDs support the stronger WPA3 encryption. With all site APs presenting the same SSIDs, clients connect to the nearest one and can roam across them as they move around.

With the controller in the mix, guest portal options are superior to those available in standalone mode since authentication methods expand to include simple password, local user, voucher, Radius or Facebook. Captive portals can be customised with your own background colours, pictures, logos and AUPs.

All managed devices are configured directly from the portal and its statistics page reveals detailed graphs for each AP showing hardware utilization, traffic, user counts, errors and retries. Speed tests on the router’s internet connection may be run as often as every ten hours and each site can be configured to handle automatic firmware upgrades for all its devices.

TP-Link Omada EAP265 HD review: Verdict

It may only be a Wi-Fi 5 AP, but the Omada EAP265 HD offers plenty of business-class wireless features and delivers a fine performance at a good price. Teaming it up with TP-Link’s controllers opens up even more features, making it a great choice for SMBs that want affordable cloud-managed wireless networks.

TP-Link Omada EAP265 HD specifications

Next-generation Wi-Fi 6 devices have been on the market for more than 18 months, but we’ve only recently started to see access points (APs) at prices that make sense for small businesses. Aruba’s entry into the low-cost fray is the AP22, which delivers a complete suite of 802.11ax services for just £144.

Despite the price, you get the full complement of management and connections options. The AP22 is part of Aruba’s Instant On family, which means it supports Aruba’s Smart Mesh technology, and can be cloud-managed from either a web portal or the free mobile app. We tried the app, which quickly discovered the AP and provided a wizard to help us add it to our account and create our first secure wireless network.

Technically speaking, the AP22 is a 2x2 MU-MIMO AP claiming speeds of up to 1,200Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 574Mbits/sec over 2.4GHz. On paper, it’s a step down from the AP12, which boasts 3x3 MU-MIMO and a 5GHz data rate of 1,300Mbits/sec – but that model is Wi-Fi 5 only, so you can expect the AP22 to be faster when connected to Wi-Fi 6 clients.

Our tests suggest that it has the edge on Wi-Fi 5 clients too. We copied a set of large files between a Windows 10 Pro desktop equipped with a Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 USB adapter and a server on the LAN. The older AP12 managed 71MB/sec at short range and 64MB/sec at 10m, while the AP22 averaged 74MB/sec up close, dropping to 67MB/sec at 10m.

The AP22 is physically lightweight, weighing in at only 500g, so it’s easy to mount on a wall or ceiling; the base kit comes with a universal mounting bracket that will also fit over the T-rails in suspended ceilings. A single Gigabit Ethernet port supports either a PoE or PoE+ power source – if you’re in need of one, Aruba’s 1930 eight-port PoE+ switch is a worthy contender, as it can be managed alongside the AP in the Instant On portal. Alternatively, you can purchase the AP22 in a bundle with a dedicated power supply.

When it comes to management, there’s no real difference between using the app and the web portal. Both present the same simple dashboard, with four panes showing your available and active networks, the number of connected clients, total data transferred over the past 24 hours and an equipment inventory.

Tap or click on the networks pane and you can get more details on current networks, and configure additional SSIDs up to a maximum of eight. Each one can support either WPA2 or the newer WPA3 encryption standard, and you can specify client bandwidth limits and active radios. For guest networks, an L2 isolation option lets clients get internet access without being able to connect to local resources, and the web console provides a superb range of tools for quickly creating mobile–friendly custom portals with your own logo and end user agreement. If you’re using the Aruba switch, you can create additional wired networks from here too, each with their own VLAN identifiers.

To keep track of everything that’s going on, the portal also provides an overview of client activity. A detailed rundown of app usage on each network is provided, broken down into 20 different categories such as productivity, email, gaming and malicious content – and you can instantly block traffic in any category by clearing the tickbox next to it.

The one thing you won’t find is a large range of Wi-Fi configuration options. Aruba handles all of this behind the scenes and the only Wi-Fi 6 setting in the dashboard is a toggle to turn it off if legacy clients are having trouble connecting to the network – which in our experience is a rare issue that you’re unlikely to encounter. You should also be aware that ultrawide 160MHz channels aren’t available, but this isn’t a deal-breaker for SMBs as few clients support it anyway.

In all, Aruba’s Instant On AP22 makes a perfect springboard into the world of Wi-Fi 6. It’s very easy to deploy and manage, and delivers good wireless performance for a price that would have seemed unthinkable only a few months ago.

Aruba Instant On AP22 specifications

We’ve been impatiently waiting for a company to produce an affordable Wi-Fi 6 router since the first wave of releases in mid-2019 and, at last, Honor has delivered. To put its price in perspective, the next cheapest Wi-Fi 6 router we’ve seen is the £150 Netgear Nighthawk AX4, and if you want the very best speeds you need to consider the Asus RT-AX88U – a snip at £300.

Then again, the Honor’s price is reflected in its features. This is a basic dual-band router with no internal modem, while its casing is small and simple: at the front, there’s a single LED that glows various colours to show the router status, and there’s a WPS button on top for easy pairing. At the back, spaced out between the aerials, are four Gigabit Ethernet ports and a pinhole reset button, but you can forget about USB ports or even a power button.

You can set up the Router 3 using either a web browser or the Huawei AI Life app (a rare acknowledgement of Honor’s former parent brand). As soon as we launched the app, it detected the unconfigured router and invited us to connect to its Wi-Fi network. If the router isn’t connected to the internet, you’ll be prompted to either plug in your modem or set up the router in repeater mode.

While the repeater mode is great to see in such an affordable router, most people will choose the former option. Here, you’re taken to a configuration page that asks if you want to combine the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands under a single SSID, or split them into two different networks. You’re also prompted to rename your network, set a Wi-Fi password – both WPA2 and WPA3 are simultaneously supported – and configure a strong administrative password for the router itself.

With this done, it’s straight into the management interface. The main screen shows a live bandwidth meter, along with big buttons for setting up parental controls and a guest Wi-Fi network. The controls only allow you to create rules that block internet access between specified times, but you can combine rules to create complex schedules and each device on your network can have its own settings.

The guest network is configurable too. As usual, you can give this a custom name and either leave it unsecured or apply a unique passphrase. Nice additions are the option to automatically disable the guest network after four hours, one day or never, and the ability to cap downstream bandwidth, meaning visitors can’t wreck the performance of your main network.

The traditional browser-based portal is neat, responsive and exposes a few advanced options that aren’t available in the app. These include configuring your IP and DHCP settings (oddly, the Router 3 defaults to the 192.168.3.x range), reserving addresses for specific clients, setting up port forwarding, blocking MAC addresses and enabling or disabling UPnP. You can configure the router to send all traffic over an outgoing L2TP or PPTP VPN, too. You won’t find any QoS controls, nor dynamic DNS or voice assistant integration, though.

So one burning question remains: can a sub-£80 router deliver the magic of Wi-Fi 6? We determined this by carrying out our usual series of tests, setting up the router in the living room and walking around our premises with a laptop equipped with an integrated Intel AX200 card. From four different locations, we connected to the router on the 5GHz band and measured download speeds from a NAS appliance connected to the router via Ethernet.

The Honor cruised through these tests. Even in rooms where Wi-Fi signals sometimes struggle to penetrate, it kept up an average download rate of 10.2MB/sec (equivalent to around 80Mbits/sec), which is more than three times the bandwidth that Netflix recommends for 4K HDR video streaming. This closely matches the AX4, but if you’re after the very fastest performance then you’ll need to splash out on the AX88U, which was often twice as fast.

We also tested speeds over 802.11ac and it provided a strong signal to even the remotest areas of the building, with nowhere dipping below a solid 11MB/sec download rate. It’s worth remembering, however, that this is only a dual-band design, so if you have lots of Wi-Fi 5 clients all wanting to send and receive data at once, speeds might quickly suffer. (This is less of an issue with Wi-Fi 6, which can handle multiple connections more gracefully.)

Even so, the Router 3 is fast enough for all but the most demanding roles, and should reach the extremities of an average-sized house or small office without any need for fiddly repeaters or expensive mesh arrangements. That’s an excellent result for such an unobtrusive and affordable router – and if you do need greater range, you can buy a second unit and use it as a zero-configuration extender.

In short, the Honor Router 3 is a cute little box that delivers decent wireless speeds, broad coverage and a modest speed boost for newer hardware – and does so at an almost irresistible price.

Honor Router 3 specifications

Zyxel’s WAX510D makes an affordable entry point into next-generation Wi-Fi. Used with compatible clients, it offers speeds well beyond what’s possible with Wi-Fi 5, with a peak throughput of 1,200Mbits/sec on the 5GHz band and 575Mbits/sec over 2.4GHz.

Management options go the extra mile too. The WAX510D can work in standalone mode, team up with one of Zyxel’s on-premises NXC controller appliances or take its orders from the cloud via Zyxel’s Nebula Control Center platform (the price above includes a year’s Professional Pack licence). For smaller offices, the cheaper NWA110AX is functionally similar but doesn’t include the Nebula subscription and can’t be managed with an NXC controller. Its internal aerials are also optimised for wall mounting, while the WAX510D is equally at home on the ceiling.

Technically, the WAX510D is well equipped, with built-in power surge protection and integrated 4G/5G interference filters. A few features are reserved for the top-dog WAX650S model, however: for £515, this adds a third radio for rogue AP detection and multi-Gigabit networking support, while the WAX510D makes do with a single Gigabit PoE+ port.

Installation in standalone mode is swift, thanks to a wizard that runs you through setting the country and changing the admin password. A default SSID is enabled on each radio, but Zyxel picks up a minor black mark for using an easy-to-guess passphrase. You should change this immediately.

Profiles are used to configure other options such as hiding certain SSIDs, enabling QoS to prioritise voice or video traffic and applying upload and download rate limits. There’s a good set of security options too, including WPA3 encryption, MAC address filtering and Layer 2 isolation. Once you’ve set up a profile, you can select it from the AP Management page and assign it to a radio, after which it immediately becomes active.

As for performance, the WAX510D put in a creditable showing in our tests. Close-range file copies between a LAN server and a Windows 10 Pro desktop equipped with a Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 USB adapter completed at a speedy 82MB/sec at close range, dropping to 75MB/sec at 10m. You can expect even better speeds from Wi-Fi 6-enabled clients, but the WAX510D doesn’t support the ultrawide 160MHz channel option – which might be one reason why we found it around 18% slower overall than Zyxel’s WAX650S.

Getting set up for cloud management is wholly painless. After using Zyxel’s Nebula app on our iPad to scan the AP’s QR code from its box, we added the AP to our site with one tap. The unit then promptly rebooted and started presenting our cloud-managed SSIDs, with its local management interface disabled.

The main Nebula home page is very informative, with a site dashboard showing total traffic, APs by usage and all connected wireless clients, along with their detected OS. If you’ve invested in other Zyxel gear, you can also manage cloud-enabled firewall gateways and switches from here.

Selecting an AP presents live and historical traffic graphs, although rogue detection services are only available in standalone mode. Configuring your networks is a very familiar process: up to eight SSIDs per site can be created, each with its own encryption scheme, bandwidth restrictions and other properties. Nebula also takes care of firmware upgrades, which you can set to run at weekly intervals.

The Zyxel WAX510D may not be the very fastest AP of its type, but for £215 it’s a great leg-up into the world of Wi-Fi 6 networking. It’s versatile and easy to deploy, and thanks to the Nebula cloud portal it’s perfectly poised for multi-site wireless network management.

Zyxel WAX510D Unified Access Point specifications

From convenience to reduced cost, there are numerous benefits of wireless networking. However, with cyber fraud on the rise, sharing your Wi-Fi connection can be risky. A recent survey by Kaspersky Lab found that “25% of the world’s Wi-Fi networks have no encryption or password protection of any kind", and that business travelers are more likely to be robbed of their data than their money.

This leaves open the question of to what extent Wi-Fi sharing is admissible for professionals, as the greater the number of devices you have on your network, the greater the chances of potential security breaches and data theft.

One good way to share the internet while keeping your network's security password secret is by enabling a guest Wi-Fi network. A guest network uses a different Wi-Fi network name and password from the wireless network you have access to.

A separate guest network means your company’s data and devices, such as servers and shared files, are far less susceptible to manipulation and hijacking. A bifurcated network also allows you to control access to critical company resources. For example, any users connected to the guest Wi-Fi can’t access resources you share on your network - unless you configure it otherwise.

From a technical standpoint, this security level is made possible by having two access points to the same router. Furthermore, an encryption algorithm ensures the confidentiality of data transmitted over the network, keeping your data secure at all times.

Now that you know the security benefits of guest networks, let's see how to set up one.

How to enable guest Wi-Fi at work

Guest wireless networks are predominantly configured and taken care of by network administrators. However, knowing the procedure can come in handy in situations where you are working remotely.

Use the following steps to set up a guest wireless network for vendors, acquaintances, neighbors, and others:

1. Enter your router’s IP address in your browser’s URL bar (this will trigger a login prompt). Refer to your router’s user manual for IP address, admin username, and password.
2. Enter the admin username and password to sign in.
3. Enable “Allow guest access” in the “Wi-Fi” section in the router settings.
4. Configure the guest network by adding a network name and password. For dual-band routers with 2.4 and 5 GHz bandwidth options, you’ll need to set a separate network name and passphrase for each band. Some router’s control panels identify the network name as the service set identifier (SSID).
5. Choose an encryption system from available options so the information transmitted over Wi-Fi can’t be intercepted (WPA2 is the preferred encryption for Wi-Fi routers)
6. Finally, disable “Allow access” to local network resources and settings.
7. Share the configured Wi-Fi network’s name and passcode to grant access to your guest network.

As an added security measure, update your router’s firmware of your home router periodically. This will help thwart hackable vulnerabilities, keeping your network secure and impenetrable.

How to share mobile Wi-Fi when out and about

For on-the-go professionals, a slow internet connection can crush productivity. It’s also plain frustrating to pay a hefty price for poor internet connection in hotel rooms and airport lounges.

Luckily, most smartphones today have a built-in feature that allows you to create a Wi-Fi hotspot. This hotspot is essentially your private internet connection that uses your cellular signal. Though you’re using your cellular connection, you can still make and receive calls and respond to texts while using the hotspot.

Some cellular plans offer “unlimited” Wi-Fi hotspot data, but the “unlimited” part applies to your internet access, not the speed. These carriers will generally give you 20-100GB per month of high-speed data at approximately 5-12Gbps downstream and 2-5Gbps upstream. Once you reach the data cap, your carrier may deprioritize your connection, leading to significantly slower hotspot speeds.

If you’re wondering how far your data will go, a high-quality Zoom group call uses 81 MB per hour, while general web browsing and email use just 7GB per month, on average. In either scenario, there are no extra charges unless you reach your data plan’s cap. However, keep in mind that even unlimited data plans have limits.

Closing unwanted background apps and disabling the auto-download feature can significantly improve mobile data speeds. Turn off the hotspot when not in use to reduce the risk of unauthorized access.

Here’s how to enable the Wi-Fi hotspot feature on the two most common OS platforms, iPhone and Android.

Setting up hotspot on iOS

1. Navigate to your smartphone’s settings
2. Tap the “Personal Hotspot” option
3. Toggle “Allow Others to Join” on

If it's your first time using the Wi-Fi hotspot feature, a pop will appear with the following information: network’s name and password. By default, the network name is the same as the name of your device. Rename the network, if necessary, and type in a new Wi-Fi password. Select WPA2 security protocol that uses AES-based encryption for added security.

Setting up hotspot on Android

1. Open “Settings”
2. Go to “Network & Internet” > “Hotspot & tethering” > “Wi-Fi hotspot”
3. Toggle “Wi-Fi hotspot” to on

Similar to the iPhone, Android mobile phones’ hotspot name is the same as the device name. Set a strong password followed by encryption type. Optionally, change the hotspot name if needed.

2.4 GHz vs 5 GHz: Which frequency should you use?

Choosing between 2.4 and 5 GHz frequencies is a tradeoff between speed and range.

The 5GHz wireless frequency band provides faster data rates, but the signal travels a shorter distance. A 2.4GHz signal travels farther, but its data speeds are slower.

The lower latency of 5GHz frequency band makes it suitable for high-bandwidth activities such as video conferencing and gaming. For devices positioned further from the router, like a smartphone or a smartwatch, a 2.4GHz network’s greater range fits the bill.

One crucial advantage 2.4GHz has over the newer 5GHz band is it penetrates solid objects more easily. Since workstations and residential areas are mostly not devoid of objects, use 5GHz in tandem with 2.4GHz to get the best of both worlds.

How to boost Wi-Fi signal strength

Wi-Fi routers have far more limited transmitting power than cell towers or base stations. Plus, obstacles, like a wall or a piece of metal, can partially or completely block Wi-Fi signals. To maximize router efficiency, avoid placing it near or on the ground.

The ideal location for a router is an elevated spot near the center of the room, as radio waves tend to spread out in a downward direction. And although Wi-Fi signals can easily pass through walls and ceilings, fewer obstacles often results in better transmission. Metal objects, mirrors and appliances that emit electromagnetic waves are strong disruptors of a Wi-Fi signal.

Finally, avoid being an easy target to Wi-Fi hackers

Even with a password-protected network, remaining vigilant is key to preventing network intrusion and unauthorized access. Changing your router’s default password is a good place to start. Typically set by the device manufacturer, a router’s username and password are the same for all users.

More concerning, hackers can access a router’s credentials through a simple Google search about the brand. To maximize protection, access your router’s administration settings and set a strong password with numbers and special characters.

Also, disable auto-connect when joining a network and refrain from accessing, visiting, or using any website you think may lack the necessary HTTPS security protocol.