Thank you EnGenius for sending us this access point and PoE injector to review!

Not so long ago, we reviewed the excellent EnGenius ECW516L. Based on the Mediatek MT7986A Quad-core A53 2GHz platform, it performs well even if it has some quirky behavior and a lower client max that might make it better suited for home or small business use. This new model, the EnGenius ECW520, is an enterprise-targeted product that has much more consistent performance in my testing, and given it's based on the Qualcomm® Networking Pro 1220 platform, seems more reliable as well. While the maximum theoretical performance of the ECW516L is faster, and in some tests it was, this new model is much more consistently fast - and I'd recommend it for most users looking for an affordable access point.

Most home users have a router that is a combination router and access point (AP) in a single device, often called a 'WiFi Router'. These are often inexpensive and convenient, but they have a few major downsides. The main one is flexibility, as businesses and other environments with lots of users often desire a more advanced router and firewall configuration than most home equipment supports. Not only that, but larger networks sometimes need more powerful equipment to be able to handle larger user bases. This often necessitates enterprise-level equipment, and a standalone (non-WiFi) router can last for many years. After all, simply routing packets is pretty well understood. WiFi standards are updated much more often.

To solve that problem, companies and larger venues (and some advanced home users) often use separate routers along with standalone access points. This EnGenius is one such access point.

This is their low-cost enterprise WiFi 7 access point, and it's primarily targeted for business use, though it's certainly fine for residential as well. Compared to their higher-end models that support up to a thousand users or more, this one supports up to a still-respectable five hundred. That should be more than enough for any home or small- or medium-sized business. Because you can add more access points to grow your capacity, this model can easily help support a pretty large crowd if used in an appropriate density.

EnGenius has two lines of access points. The previous ECW516L model I reviewed was for their Lite line, which is meant for homes and small offices. This model, being a 'full' model, has a lot of optional features for professionals and businesses that requires a Pro subscription license. These features range from assisting in access point placement to VLAN pooling to extended (and extensive) logging and reporting and a whole lot more. The Basic plan, which is free for all users, covers the basics for most home and small business users and is more than enough for most. If you are looking for an access point for a small number of users, the regular or Lite models are pretty much indistinguishable - though in my experience the ECW520 has been more reliable, so I recommend this model anyway.

The only notable Basic plan feature the Lite is missing is 'HotSpot 2.0', also known as Passpoint. As I don't have two access points with this functionality, I can't really test it to understand how it works. What I can say is that most home users don't need this. Unfortunately, I am testing this ECW520 in my home, so I can't speak to these advanced features. Doing some basic research, HotSpot 2.0 seems to offer a streamlined way for guests to connect to your WiFi network, as well as a way for cellphones to connect to their carrier over WiFi. It seems like there's a pretty involved setup required.

As I am not currently managing a business's WiFi, especially one that could afford a Pro license, I am testing and deploying this at my home, and I'm limited to testing Basic features. Historically, my setup has always been a bit more complex than the average homeowner, but certainly not enough to need a Pro license. For home use, the modular design of using separate access points has allowed me to upgrade my WiFi while leaving everything else intact.

The only notable Basic plan feature the Lite is missing is 'HotSpot 2.0', also known as Passpoint. As I don't have two access points with this functionality, I can't really test it to understand how it works. What I can say is that most home users don't need this. Unfortunately, I am testing this ECW520 in my home, so I can't speak to these advanced features. Doing some basic research, HotSpot 2.0 seems to offer a streamlined way for guests to connect to your WiFi network, as well as a way for cellphones to connect to their carrier over WiFi. It seems like there's a pretty involved setup required.

As I am not currently managing a business's WiFi, especially one that could afford a Pro license, I am testing and deploying this at my home, and I'm limited to testing Basic features. Historically, my setup has always been a bit more complex than the average homeowner, but certainly not enough to need a Pro license. For home use, the modular design of using separate access points has allowed me to upgrade my WiFi while leaving everything else intact.

After upgrading to the ECW516L during the last review, I left my main router as the same WiFi 6 model as before (with disabled radios), which has a couple of 10Gb Ethernet ports. I intend to get rid of that Asus entirely at some point, but since that hasn't happened yet, I might as well take advantage of its other features. I ended up purchasing another 10Gb/2.5Gb PoE (power over ethernet) switch so that I could connect this ECW520 to it, and then ran a 10Gb ethernet line to my other switches. It's a pretty high-performance setup, and it has given us very little trouble.

The EnGenius ECW520 (and the ECW516L) is powered via PoE+ (Power over Ethernet, with PoE+ meaning 30W). The package does not include a power adapter in the box, so you have to make sure that the Ethernet port that you use to connect the access point to your network has power. Out of the box this is not likely to be the case, since most inexpensive home network switches are not powered. Thankfully, PoE switches are getting more and more affordable, and EnGenius sent us one of their PoE injectors, which allows you to add PoE to any existing data Ethernet wire. Where my ECW516L is located, I'm using a PoE injector there, but as I mentioned above, I ended up buying a PoE switch for where my ECW520 is connected, so I'm just using the PoE switch directly to power the access point. When I was testing it as my sole access point, I did use the PoE injector. Whatever the case, PoE allows you to use any existing Ethernet cable to power the access point, as long as it has PoE, either from the switch or using an injector.

My house is a ranch-style dwelling with a full basement. When we moved in, the basement was entirely unfinished, but we finished it a couple of years ago and ran Ethernet throughout all of the new construction. We installed over twenty LAN ports, with multiple in each room. I also made sure that we had a couple of strategically-placed ports available for WiFi use: one in the opposite corner of the house near the ceiling (with ceiling AC power), and another in a centrally-located closet.

With only one access point, I used a centrally-located Ethernet port in my basement at the same spot as where I had the ECW516L before. Once I decided to start testing with two, this ECW520 and the older ECW516L, I moved the ECW520 to my living room connected to that PoE switch I mentioned before, and moved the ECW516L to the opposite corner of my basement where I used to keep an access point before the first EnGenius AP arrived.

For this review, I tested the ECW520 by itself, and also used it together with the ECW516L. You see, with the access point centrally located, most of the house gets great signal, but it drops off quickly near the edges, and my daughter had real signal issues in her bedroom. I would say the range was slightly improved over the ECW516L, but not by much. I also had poor signal on my patio, where I like to work when the weather is nice. I have since moved the ECW520 to a prime location along my living room wall, and the ECW516L to the corner of my basement, underneath my daughter's room. Since doing this, all WiFi issues have vanished, after working with EnGenius Support to discover and resolve a problem.

You see, I received the ECW520 very close to release. The ECW516L, being on a different product line, doesn't automatically handle access point handoffs to the ECW520 as smoothly as they might if they were in the same product line. So, I tried configuring the RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) Association Request Threshold setting, which causes all kinds of problems when using it with WiFi 7 MLO (Multi-Link Operation). Everything worked great except for my two WiFi 7 clients, our gaming laptops. After working with EnGenius support, it turns out that this setting is incompatible with MLO, so EnGenius disabled that from the firmware side, so this should not cause problems for anyone going forward. It's been pretty rock solid since, even if a client takes a bit longer to switch to a closer access point than I might otherwise prefer.

Speaking of MLO (Multi-Link Operation, in case you missed that before), that is one of WiFi 7's most important features. Unlike previous WiFi versions where you connect to an access point and it might choose the fastest band it can, MLO allows the device to connect to multiple frequency bands at once and use them all. For example, both 5GHz and 6GHz are high performance, while 2.4GHz is a lot slower. So, why not use two or three bands at once and double performance? That's what MLO allows you to do, and in my testing it makes a significant difference.

Now, I discovered that I could only get the maximum performance out of this WiFi 7 card when running Linux; my gaming laptop in Windows lost something like 40% of the performance available. On Windows, iperf3 needed the -P flag to add multiple threads to get much past 1Gb/s, and I maxed out around 1.5Gb/s. Once I rebooted into Linux, on the same machine I was able to see close to 1.5Gb/s on a single thread, and with multiple threads I even saw peaks over 2.3Gb/s, which is very close to the maximum I would expect, especially since the AP is limited by a 2.5Gb/s Ethernet connection. Having WiFi performance that rivals multi-gigabit connections is nothing short of fantastic.

Speeds like this are well past 'good enough' for most people. For me, WiFi 6 was pretty close to that - not quite gigabit speed, but good enough for most use cases. Now, with Wifi 7, we can outperform wired gigabit networks in realistic conditions, which is pretty fantastic.

Outside of performance, I thought it was time to explain how I configured this access point. To initially set it up, you need to scan a QR code and set it up using a mobile app. I run Android, so I did it via their Cloud To-Go app. As part of that setup, you create an engenius.ai account, and you can only manage this access point through that account. Since I already had one, I just added this access point to my existing account and added it to my Home network, and within a few minutes it showed up automatically configured for my network. For new users, there is a lot more to it, but here, it was almost plug and play.

Being a Cloud-managed only model, the app or a Cloud-based login through EnGenius's website is the only way to manage these access points. It's worth noting that if you have a configuration problem with an EnGenius product and the Internet is down, it might not be possible to resolve it unless Internet access is restored. If it's the only way for you to access the Internet, if you have a configuration problem you might run into a chicken and egg problem, so keep that in mind and build your network carefully.

Outside of the catch-22 of Cloud-managed hardware for internal use, the management interface is very powerful and flexible. You can administer seemingly any number of EnGenius devices through the interface, and a whole lot of features are made available even to 'Basic' users, aka freeloaders like me. There is a 'Pro' license available that enables more functionality, and a three month trial is available, though I felt no need to use it.

The management features are varied and powerful, far exceeding your typical home networking equipment. Even though much of the logging is limited for Basic users, there are still plenty to choose from. This new 'full' model, in contrast to the Lite model I reviewed last time, has a lot more features available, especially with a Pro license. With that said, if you aren't likely to spend the money on a subscription, either is just fine.

There are plenty of enterprise-level features that no sane home user would use, but are popular in businesses and public places for good reason. These include things like captive portals (that's the web site that most hotels and businesses expect you to click through to get free WiFi), client lists and management, application monitoring, radio and mesh configuration, and a whole lot more. There are also multiple link modes, 802.11 extension types, security options that range from Open to Enterprise with RADIUS support, and no doubt others I missed. You can even prevent WiFi devices from seeing or talking to each other. VLANs can be configured, which most enterprises require. When it comes to WiFi itself, you can also adjust signal strenth levels for handoffs to other access points along with a couple of other related options. The features are many, and while some are locked behind a Pro subscription, plenty are not. I would suspect most IT professionals would find their Pro-level subscription offers the features they need as long as the price makes sense for them. An access point like this might require a bit more IT savvy than the average consumer, though it's fantastic in operation.

As before, I set up four SSIDs, each for a different purpose and to test something different. On my old setup I had a separate 2.4GHz and 5GHz SSID, and while I kept a similar naming scheme, I changed that somewhat. WiFi 7 supports a much better version of Band Steering, and along with Multi-Link Operation, there is a good reason to have a single SSID with all (or most) of the frequency bands together. You see, classic WiFi uses 2.4GHz, and it has great range but relatively poor performance; while theoretical speeds are good, you almost never see them in the real world. For most of us, you are extremely lucky to see speeds near 30MB/s, or around 300Mb/s, with it typically much lower. It also doesn't help that lots of consumer devices, like Bluetooth, wireless mice/controllers, and even appliances pollute the 2.4GHz spectrum, making good performance difficult.

Most modern WiFi setups will at least have 5GHz bands available. This part of the wireless spectrum in my mind is the best balance between performance and usable range. You see, the higher the frequency, the faster the connection can be, but at the cost of penetrability through walls, as well as overall signal range. WiFi 6E introduced 6GHz, and WiFi 7 continues that. It can be quite fast if you are in the same room as the access point. But for most of us, we have at least one wall, and sadly 6GHz falls apart.

This new access point performed much better over 6GHz than the ECW516L before it. I really can't explain why, especially since the rated power level is less. What I can say is that I didn't see the 1.5Gb/s+ speeds on the older access point, even though I really should have. Whatever the case, this ECW520 performed better overall for me.

The EnGenius Cloud7 2x2x2 Indoor Tri-Band Access Point model ECW520 is a fantastic option for those who want an affordable access point with enterprise-level features for those who need it. For the very reasonable price of $189.00, you get a whole lot of functionality, and no required subscription fee. The performance is excellent for the right clients, and Internet downloads and such perform excellently. File transfers was a weak point of the ECW516L, as I found one direction to be slower than the other, but that seems largely resolved with his model. Overall stability has also been improved with this new model, once the firmware upgrade did its job.

The convenience of PoE, the crazy flexibility of how multiple SSIDs can be configured, and the many benefits of WiFi 7 like improved security and the excellent performance has me grateful to base my home network on these access points. Their Cloud-based configuration management is very impressive, though the paranoid part of me worries that if EnGenius's servers are ever hacked, my WiFi network could be uniquely vulnerable to exploitation. Whatever the case, there is a really good value on offer for this product. If you are looking to set up a large network of WiFi access points, or wish to upgrade your home with enterprise-grade WiFi equipment, this is a great option. Recommended for the right user!