There’s a huge price difference between the small office EWS “Fit” and midsize business ECW line of APs from EnGenius. What’s the feature difference between the product lines?
I think Wendell has ECW336, ECW220, and ECW110’s at his house, and Ryan has the ECW220s. I haven’t seen them talk about the EWS models, but the price and ability to avoid the cloud with a $100 controller (FitCon100) makes me want to go with the $150 EWS377-FIT.
I can’t tell the difference from the data sheets for the ECW230 and the EWS377-FIT. And it looks like the ECW336 is the ECW230 but Wifi6 → Wifi6e and 2.5 GbE → 5 GbE.
Steering is critical for me. One 5G AP would be able to cover my open floorplan if it weren’t for the thicc bank vault in the center. I have full coverage with two APs on opposite corners, but I need the Surface laptops to round the vault corner without dropping an MSSQL connection.
I don’t have that many wireless clients. Everything that can be hardwired is. Maybe two dozed untrusted phones, tablets, and IoT devices, plus six trusted Surface laptops.
Any advice on what I should go with? I’m boxing up and returning Mikrotik cAP ax’s. It’s one problem after another with them.
The best for handoff are also the subscription model APs sadly Aruba and meraki
Engenius is way better/consistency than ubiquity but ubiquity can be better if you bend over backwards configuring it then don’t touch it or let it auto update
Fully agree with this. We have Unifi solutions deployed in four offices and I used to run a 27 AP setup, covering every inch of a 25 acre campus inside and out. The advantage, as I see it, is cost. Free controller software, no on-going subscriptions or support contracts. I’ve had very few issues and none that caused any user havoc.
That said, you need to know what you are doing and do not auto-update. Set up weekly backups (most people could do monthly backups without issue as once it’s set there is no reason to touch anything.) Controller updates are a bit of a faff if you have it set up as a service. The AP’s work even if the controller is down, which is a huge bonus. I update semi-annually. I’d suggest starting small and getting used to everything, then scale up.
I took down the MikroTik cAP ax’s and put up two EWS377-FIT. Here are my thoughts after a week.
Installation and configuration were dead simple. I, a software dev, had them running in less than 5 minutes. The cAP ax’s took several days and a lot of googling. Setting the primary SSID to untagged with secondary networks tagged was a PITA with MikroTik.
I am not a fan of the FitXpress cloud controller:
Several-minute delay when pushing configs.
Auto channel selection frequently uses the same radio channel as another AP:
No Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS button) for printers.
Can’t get older Canon G4210’s to connect.
Kicking a client redirects network requests to an unauthorized page rather than disconnecting them. It’s impossible to kick a client stuck on an AP in hopes it reconnects to a better one (IoT devices):
no defined pool of radio channels – it’s full auto or defined per AP.
But includes some extra features:
per SSID time of day/week scheduling.
per client bandwidth limits.
That said, I’m keeping them. For starters, $150 per AP is a very attractive price. These devices exceeded my expectations for signal strength and line speed, especially in my environment (bank with 10" to 18" thick interior concrete walls).
More importantly, it solves my main pain point - seamless roaming. I’d rate the FitXpress cloud controller as A+ (except for IoT devices and printers). With MikroTik’s CAPsMAN, steering was all over the place:
S tier - Android devices
A tier - Win11 Framework Laptop
B tier - Old Apple devices
C tier - New Apple devices
D tier - IoT, printers
F tier - Win10 Surface 5/6
I ordered a FitController to see if cloud-less is better. For now, my older Canon printers are on a TP-Link N300 2T2R, which I guess is fine.
Are you sure that you’re not thinking of the cloud line of switches? None of the Fit switches support anything other than 1G and 10G SFP uplink.
I still find it baffling that they have a Fit AP with 2.5G but no Fit switch support for it. All of the good stuff seems to be locked inside their cloud management.
