EnGenius ECW515 review: EnGenius brings Wi-Fi 7 services to a wall near you – at a price

As an early entrant into the business Wi-Fi 7 market, EnGenius now boasts an extensive portfolio of access points (APs) suited to a wide range of environments and budgets. The only space it hasn't focused on a great deal is wall plate APs as up until now, its only offering has been the ECW215 Wi-Fi 6 model.

The ECW515 improves the situation as it delivers Wi-Fi 7 services to target markets such as the hospitality, classroom, meeting room and multi-tenant sectors. It may only be a dual-band AP, but has the hardware to handle a high demand as it sports the same powerful Qualcomm Networking Pro 1220 platform and quad-core ARM Cortex-A73 CPU as Engenius' flagship APs.

This BE3600-rated AP offers two spatial streams each for the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands and claims maximum speeds of 700Mbits/sec and 2,900Mbits/sec respectively. It offers plenty of connection options as along with a main 2.5GbE multi-Gig port, it has a built-in quad-port Gigabit switch with the fourth port (LAN5) providing an 802.3af PoE feed for powering in-room devices such as IP phones.

EnGenius ECW515 review: Hardware features

The ECW515 is one of the smallest wall plate APs we've yet seen as it measures a mere 110 x 42 x 130mm (WDH) and weighs only 328gms. It has a metal chassis and polycarbonate cover and presents the main 2.5GbE port at the rear with the four Gigabit ports in the base.

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The box includes a solid metal mounting plate which the AP is clipped on to and secured with one screw. A single orange status LED is located on the side which shows cloud connection status and flashes when the AP is booting or receiving a firmware upgrade.

If the AP is powered over 802.3at PoE+, the LAN5 port will supply 7W to a powered device (PD). Using an optional external 54V DC supply will boost this to 15W.

EnGenius ECW515 review: Cloud management

EnGenius offers two types of wireless AP and all ECW models can only be cloud managed. The Wi-Fi 6 EWS Fit6 models are aimed at small businesses with limited on-site IT expertise and can be standalone or cloud-managed from the free FitXpress web portal.

For testing, we connected the ECW515 to the lab's Engenius ECS2512FP 2.5GbE PoE+ switch. The AP presents a local web interface but this only displays an overview of LAN, internet and cloud connection status.

Assigning the AP to our cloud account was easy as we used the Cloud To-Go iOS app on an iPad to scan its QR code. Once we had added the AP to our chosen site, it received a firmware upgrade and started broadcasting our predefined site SSIDs.

The cloud portal dashboard provides details on all APs, switches and wireless clients with graphs below for wireless throughput plus the top APs, clients and SSIDs. Enable the application control service on your SSIDs and the dashboard populates a table below with the top ten apps and their bandwidth usage.

Up to eight SSIDs per radio are supported and for each one, you can choose the active radios, apply an encryption scheme, enable L2 isolation and turn on MLO (multi-link operations) with the console warning you that legacy clients that don't support WPA3 will be excluded. The drop-down menu at the top offers plenty of other useful features including assigning download and upload rate limits for the entire SSID or per client and adding captive portals, hotspot services and basic firewall rules.

The four Gigabit ports are remotely controlled from the portal so you can enable or disable any of them as required. A smart feature is 'SSID on LAN' as this allows you to bind a selected SSID to them and apply wireless VLAN, security settings and captive portals to wired devices.

Adding a Pro licence to your portal account enables enhanced features such as a 30-day log retention period, network topology views and 7-day timeline charts of the APs a client connected to, the authentication methods in use and details of association errors such as incorrect passwords. Prices are quite reasonable with 1-year and 3-year subscriptions costing £57 and £136 per device respectively.

Captive portal features are good as you can present wireless guests with custom splash pages created using the portal's integrated HTML editor toolbox. Standard authentication methods include local user accounts, Radius servers and vouchers with a Pro licence enabling LDAP, Active Directory, Google LDAP and Azure AD.

EnGenius ECW515 review: Wi-Fi 7 performance

For our performance tests, we used a Lenovo Windows 11 Pro desktop client equipped with a TP-Link Archer TBE550E Wi-Fi 7 PCIe adapter and a Dell PowerEdge Windows server connected to one of the switch's 10GbE fibre ports. We enabled MLO on our WPA3-protected SSID and saw the Windows 11 client create an aggregated link using both radios and report a link speed of 3,570Mbits/sec.

To test maximum speed, we used the OpenSpeedTest HTML5-based tool and ran the server component of our Windows Server host. On the Windows 11 client, we pointed a browser at the OpenSpeedTest server address and port and watched it report back with close-range upload and download rates of 169MB/sec and 200MB/sec.

Moving the AP 10 metres away and into an adjoining room with a wall in the way saw it deliver upload and download speeds of 137MB/sec and 174MB/sec. Use the application analysis service with caution as this will hit performance with further tests showing it can drop wireless speeds by up to 10%.

EnGenius ECW515 review: Is it worth it

EnGenius has a very limited number of UK resellers and the only vendor that could provide us with a price for the ECW515 was Solwise with it quoting £187 including VAT. This is a little pricey as the TP-Link EAP775-Wall we recently reviewed only costs around £13 more and delivers tri-band Wi-Fi 7 in-room services.

The ECW515 is very easy to deploy though, and its dual radios deliver a performance that should satisfy the target market of hotel guests and meeting room participants. The cloud portal offers a good range of remote management services and the smart SSID on LAN feature allows you to secure access to the four Gigabit ports.

EnGenius ECW515 specifications