First of all, thank you for checking out this thread, I hope you’re having a fantastic day.
So, for context, I’m a tech enthusiast and I’m always looking for ways to improve my setup at home. I live in Australia, so niche equipment is hard to come by. Often I have to pay extra or import from US sellers and just accept that I get no warranty.
At my residence I hope to eventually have a NAS and high speed networking through the whole house, but for now I just want to upgrade from the garbage AIO device my ISP bundled with my internet.
Which is where you come in
I’m looking for an access point that supports WPA3. Honestly that’s about it. I don’t need a ton of bandwidth since I only have 50Mbit FTTN. The only other feature I’d like is the ability to give the wired network a higher priority than the wifi network so my ping doesn’t bounce around like a drunk kangaroo as soon as someone loads up a netflix stream. With my limited networking experience I don’t know if that’s a router setting, managed switch feature, or something a good WAP can be set to do.
Anyway, slightly sidetracked…
Devices I’ve considered are:
Ubiquiti Unifi6 Lite (I’ve started hearing horror stories about Ubiquiti, but originally I was set on purchasing this device)
TP Link EAP610 (Leaning towards this one)
EnGenius EWS357AP (Seems like a better option, but not available in Australia)
I’d prefer to spend less than $250 AUD on the WAP, since I’ll most likely need to pay for shipping and purchase a POE injector as well.
My residence is about 16m long and maybe 6m wide, single storey, plasterboard sheet and timber frame construction, with most rooms being less than 3 walls away from my planned mounting location. Not a lot of high bandwidth devices, but quite a few smart home devices clogging up the 2.4 radio
I’d love to hear any thoughts, suggestions, or advice anyone cares to share!
You will need a cloud key or run the cloud key software on a machine in order to administer this WAP. Good kit but you have to really invest in the Ubiquiti ecosystem.
I have the 377 units. They have local management and have 2.5Gbps wired connection. I think the 357 is only 1Gbps. There is also a cloud key like solution from Engenius if your want to go that route but you still maintain local management as well.
I have not heard anything bad about these but I have never used them. A few people in the forvm just purchased some TPLink EAPs due to cost and availability. Maybe they can chime in about them.
**Edit
I have about 32 Smart home devices currently on my 2.4 network and it handles them like a champ
How about the Mikrotik hAP AX²?
That’ll give you all the basic (and pretty advanced) routing functions you need, supports WPA3, Wi-Fi 6 and one PoE in/out port as well.
It’ll cost you about $175~200, depending on whereyoubuy it (yes, they’re three links and fairly local). But it would save you the trouble of buying an PoE injector as well.
Wow that’s strange. We have a dual skymuster & FW and the FW can sometimes rarely occasionally sort of for a brief second lol get 72mbps. Though maybe u mean a 50mbit plan with an rsp?
If u want the plug and play stuff then ubiquity is deff what you want just keep in mind that ur placing trust and basically being bound to ubiquity and they aren’t without their faults… plus since they’re a big name they are more of a target…uve prolly read bout some of the stuffs and the whole walled garden apple-ish-ness so…
But saves u from having to build your own, pfsense etc and do all the nitty gritty stuffs. I can’t remember if fttn and fttp need a modem or if u can just do Ethernet wan and bypass any combined stuffs needed… +1Aug’s suggestion…less is more and poe on hand is always good
I have the EAP660, not the same but closest in comparison to the other responses
The AP is part of TP-Link’s Omada program, which offers software and tools to manage a fleet of Omada devices. As such it is part of an eco-system that you can grow into - similar to Ubiquiti and EnGenius.
On the other hand, the devices works perfectly fine stand-alone and does not require a connection to an Omada network.
I operate my EAP device in standalone mode and after initial configuration (including use of WPA3) have basically rarely touched it. That’s a good thing, right?
I have a few more Omada devices and plan to deploy their management software in a local docker container (although TP-Link very much advertises it, the cloud service is not required) at some point, but it’s low priority and it requires careful planning because wifi is part of critical infrastructure for my family
Like Jode mentioned, the Engenius stuff works the same way. It is all locally managed but you can grow into the echo system if need be. It is a nice way to try it before going all in on a brand.
Newer Unifi APs support WPA3. However, only very modern WiFi clients will connect properly with WPA3. Newish gear will fallback to WPA2. Legacy and IoT gear may refuse to connect even in WPA3/WPA2 transition mode. And transition mode is vulnerable to downgrade attacks so it is of questionable value over WPA2.
True, but SSH is still a thing if you want to run a string of commands or write directly to the configuration files. Obviously no normie would do that but that is an option.
Engenius also has a pure cloud solution as well so I think they are trying to hedge their bets on everything eventually moving to the cloud so either you cloud manage or you manually manage your swarm, but nothing in between, because, recurring revenue… I guess. Everyone wants you to subscribe to a service.
I have two Grandstream GWN7630 at home (4 at work) that are absolute beasts for the money. They cost me around €130 each.
They have all the bells and whistles an access point for home or small business needs and I can pull around 500mbit from them.
The 76xx work as a controller so no need for software/dedicated controller hardware.
Their bigger brother GWN7660 has wifi 6 but is significantly more expensive.
My gosh, you’re all amazing. Thanks a ton for all your suggestions!
So to confirm, these don’t need any kind of management device like Unifi seems to? If that’s the case, that’s another option since I found a couple Aussie suppliers for the gwn7660.
Since I’m trying to avoid this
I’m not really looking for an aio solution, but this is surprisingly cheap for wifi6! That’s going on the list of considerations.
I think I understand what you’re getting at, but could you clarify things for me? When a wpa2 device connects to a wpa3 enabled AP, does the AP not negotiate to downgrade that device and only that device to wpa2? And if it is possible, would that compromise all of the traffic to that AP, or just the device connected using WPA2? Or alternatively, is the only option to have two separate AP’s, if I want an ecosystem using both security protocols?
Yesssssss, that’s exactly what I’m hoping for.
Yes that’s what I intended to say.
The run-on sentence made me giggle xD
I’m not sure what I said that caused the misunderstanding though, would you mind explaining?
YES, THIS IS-sorry I’m being loud, this is exactly why I made this thread. I’d have never found stuff like this and the Grandstream gear. And it’s available in Aus! For 155 bucks!!! Added to the options, thank you
Glad to be of help!
I “found” MikroTik a while ago when I was looking for options myself (to replace my ISP provided router). And I recently bought the hAP AX² as well… The learning curve if coming from a “standard” router is a bit steeper, but from what you wrote I expect that it isn’t really much more of a problem than OpenWRT or homebrew router solutions.
And yeah… Importing can be quite annoying, so I looked up something locally available
