TP-Link’s EAP655-Wall is designed to offer discrete Wi-Fi 6 services to a wide range of environments, such as meeting rooms, apartments and home offices. This affordable palm-sized package will also appeal to hotels looking to provide in-room network services as it has three gigabit ports in its base and can deliver PoE on the third one – ideal for adding extra room devices such as IP phones.

The EAP655-Wall offers plenty of features for the price. This AX3000 dual-band access point (AP) delivers speeds of up to 2,402Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 574Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz radio. It also supports the high-speed Wi-Fi 6 160MHz channels, although the AP’s main uplink port is only the gigabit variety so you won’t see their full potential.

Even so, the EAP655-Wall delivered good overall results in our real-world performance tests. We started with its 80MHz channels enabled. Closerange copies of a large file between a Dell Windows 11 Pro workstation equipped with a TP-Link Archer TXE75E Wi-Fi 6E PCI-E card and a server on our 10GbE LAN averaged 94MB/sec, dropping to 77MB/sec with the AP moved ten meters away and into an adjoining room.

With the AP’s 160MHz channels activated, the workstation reported a 2.4Gbits/sec wireless connection. Unsurprisingly, our file copies maxed out the AP’s gigabit port and only increased to 111MB/sec at close range and 91MB/sec at ten meters, although these speeds will easily be good enough for all but the most demanding of users.

The AP can be managed in standalone mode, but most businesses will prefer TP-Link’s Omada cloud service as they can manage all their APs from one central web portal. Previously, each site required a hardware or software controller installed locally, but TP-Link now also offers cloud-based controllers with yearly prices starting at £12 per device.

From our main Omada cloud portal account, we viewed all our hardware, software and cloud-based controllers, and selecting the latter took us to its dedicated management console. Before adding the AP to our site, we made sure we’d enabled the cloud-based controller management option from its local web console. We could then import the AP by entering its serial number, naming it and assigning a license. After adoption, access to its local console was disabled and it started broadcasting our site-managed SSIDs.

The site portal presents a detailed dashboard that can be customized with widgets; we added ones to show details such as AP traffic and client distributions, the most active APs, a Wi-Fi summary and 24-hour graphs of client associations and overall wireless traffic. The AP was connected to the lab’s TP-Link TL-SG3210XHP-M2 PoE+ multi-gigabit switch, and we added more widgets to show its active ports, PoE usage and the available power budget.

Wireless features are extensive, with up to eight SSIDs per radio supported and options to apply mixed WPA2/WPA3 encryption. You can set global or per client and SSID upload and download rate limits, and use guest networks to block users from private networks. Captive portal features are equally good, with profiles used to apply a global password, local user, voucher, Radius or Facebook authentication and add logos, greeting messages and acceptable use policies.

The three gigabit pass-through ports are enabled by default, and PoE services on the third port can be activated by checking this option in the portal’s AP configuration page, although make sure the main LAN port is connected to a PoE+ source. During testing, they worked fine and after connecting a Yealink IP phone to the third port, it duly received power and internet access.

It would have been good to see a 2.5GbE port, but the EAP655-Wall remains a reasonably fast Wi-Fi 6 AP with a good range. It offers a wealth of wireless features for a modest price, cloud management is excellent and its three gigabit downlink ports with extra power delivery make it even more versatile.

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The WAX220 is the latest member of Netgear’s Business Essentials range of Wi-Fi 6 access points (APs) and aims to fill the gap between consumer and enterprise use. Targeting small businesses and home offices that require only a single AP, the WAX220 has a speedy AX4200 rating made up of 600Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz radio and 3,600Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio.

Performance is a priority as the WAX220 supports the high-speed Wi-Fi 6 160MHz channels and adds the Wi-Fi 6 Release 2 uplink MU-MIMO feature for faster client upload speeds. Its 2.5GbE LAN port supports a PoE+ power source; you’re expected to provide this as Netgear doesn’t include a 12V DC power adapter, which costs an extra £13.

Build quality is good, with the WAX220 endowed with a finned metal back plate that acts as a heatsink. The kit includes a mounting plate and metal bracket so you can fit it to a wall, a normal ceiling or a suspended ceiling T-bar.

Designed for standalone use, the WAX220 only offers local web browser admin access and doesn’t support Netgear’s Insight cloud management, wireless meshing or captive portals. On the positive side, Netgear claims you can unpack the AP and be up and running in ten minutes.

This is easily achievable. We connected the AP to the lab’s Zyxel XS1930-12HP 10GbE multi-gigabit PoE++ switch and followed the browser’s quick start wizard. In a single screen, you set a new admin password, add your first wireless network, provide an encryption key and wait two minutes while it reboots.

The WAX220 delivered good results in our Wi-Fi 6 real-world performance tests using a Dell Windows 11 Pro workstation with a TP-Link Archer TXE75E Wi-Fi 6/6E PCI-E adapter. Starting with the AP’s 80MHz channels enabled, large file copies between the workstation and a Windows server on our 10GbE LAN averaged 116MB/sec at close range, dropping to 88MB/sec with the AP ten meters away in an adjoining room.

With the 160MHz channels enabled, our test client showed a connection speed of 2.4Gbits/sec. Speed improved nicely with our close range copies averaging 180MB/sec and holding steady at 157MB/sec with the AP moved to the next room.

The AP’s web console isn’t as pretty as the standalone version offered by Netgear’s high-end Insight APs but it does provide easy access to all features. The separate management wireless network improves security and it can be set to close down after it’s been idle for 15 minutes, though the AP must be rebooted to enable it again.

From the console’s management page you can modify the 2.4GHz and 5GHz channel modes and create up to four wireless SSIDs. For each SSID, you can choose personal WPA2, WPA2/WPA3 or WPA3 encryption and enable the guest network option so connected clients get internet access but can’t see other devices on the same network.

If you want to present a safe open public network, the WAX220 supports opportunistic wireless encryption (OWE), which secures endpoint traffic from eavesdropping without the need for an authentication password. We checked this out on our Windows 11 wireless client where it spotted our guest network had enhanced open security and connected using OWE without any problems.

A simple dashboard shows the AP’s status, a connection table reveals all active clients and you can pull up graphs of CPU usage plus inbound and outbound SSID and LAN traffic over the previous three minutes. There isn’t much else to see, although the AP can scan each radio for external wireless networks and list them.

For a basic standalone Wi-Fi 6 AP, the WAX220 isn’t great value; TP-Link’s faster EAP670 has an AX5400 rating, supports standalone and cloud management modes and can be had for under £150. On the plus side, the WAX220 can be swiftly deployed, delivers good performance, and OWE support makes it easy to provision secure public networks.

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