As with most WiFi equipment, 2.4GHz has much greater penetration of walls and floors, but performance is always less than 5GHz at shorter distances. In theory, if it was connected to a combination of two machines, one on the LAN and one by WiFi it might be possible, but the significant variables in that scenario make the results less useful. For our own sanity, we decided to test the performance to a LAN connected server, and that boiled the performance down to around 800Mbps at close range. That’s not the very fastest we’ve seen, but highly respectable.

The high hardware costs like the Netgear Orbi Pro are unsustainable in the longer term, and businesses are looking for low-cost, flexible solutions that can adapt to their business.With the wireless scheduler option, we were able to easily set when the WAX214 is available using the Schedule Table. You can also set when to automatically reboot the access point, which is a good idea to do on a weekly basis.

Now it's time to access its local web interface. (The AP doesn't have a mobile app, which is great.)

Possible Applications

Therefore, the only feasible way that this unit could use its full capability is when two wireless connected devices exchange data with each other through the access point. The total 1775 Mbps of throughput is divided between connected users (up to 256) and is also restricted by the 1000 Mbps LAN downlink. If all the users are connecting to the greater network and not between other wireless connected devices, the shared capacity will be limited by the LAN connection. It’s also very dependent on the connecting adapter, as we discovered that the typical speeds for some laptop wireless adapters were closer to 700Mbps, even if they were 802.11ax rated. The Network > Wireless section allows you to configure detailed wireless settings of an access point for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz connections. This includes the Channel HT Mode and client limits, as well as enabling/disabling the Auto RF, 11ax mode, and multicast settings. We were very impressed with the granularity of the possible configurations, as the NWA90AX sports up to 8 SIDs, assisted roaming, Bridge mode, Layer 2 isolation, Cloud authentication and Enterprise WPA2/WPA3 logins.