Tuesday, September 21, 2021

WiFi 6 AP recommendations?

I'm building out my office network, and have been frustrated trying to select appropriate hardware for the WiFi side of things. Right now we're in a very small office (literally one room) and only need one access point, but when (if, heh) COVID stops being such a nuisance and we go back to a greater in-person presence we may move to a significantly larger office where multiple APs are required.

Here's what I'm looking for:

  • WiFi 6 compatibility - doesn't need to be blazing fast, I'm more concerned with network reliability while maintaining reasonable speeds. Wondering if 6e might help (by using the theoretically less congested 6GHz spectrum), but not sure what's available and if it's worth it cost-wise.
  • Controller-based management - while we're starting out with a single AP, if/when we move to a larger office I want to be able to expand, and manage all APs from a central controller. I DO NOT want cloud-managed for a variety of reasons; it's fine if it supports cloud management, as long as I can turn that off.
  • Reasonable price - looking at the ~$200 price range, maybe $300. Our entire buildout budget right now is like $3000 and that has to also cover a NAS, two switches (most of our equipment is wired), and a router.

Currently considering TPLink EAP620 or the UniFi U6 Lite. I have experience with an EAP245 at home and have played with the Omada software before, so I have familiarity there. However, I'm frustrated that the Omada controller requires outdated software (MongoDB 3.x and Java 8), though I'm eyeballing running it from a docker container so it can play with its outdated crap in an isolated box. UniFi looks intriguing and seems to check the boxes, but of course there's the whole security breach snafu... not sure of the extent of what was compromised there, or if a similar breach could compromise an AP that isn't touching their cloud infrastructure (I'll block traffic to/from their telemetry and management sites by force if necessary).

Curious what other reasonable options I might have. The Netgear WAX610 looked interesting, but there doesn't seem to be any sort of central management solution; it appears to only offer either on-device local management or cloud management. The Zyxel WAX510D looks interesting but it's the priciest of the three (and appears to be their lowest tier that includes controller management)... also it looks like you may only be able to manage it with dedicated controller hardware (driving the cost out of our range)?



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