Linksys LAPAC2600C
An affordable AP that’s strong on performance and offers easy management for small businesses
SCORE
PRICE £183 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com
If the LAPAC2600C looks familiar, there’s a good reason for that. This Wave 2 wireless AP takes everything we liked about Linksys’ old LAPAC2600 model – including the funky rounded hexagonal design – and adds full cloud management capabilities. To show how serious Linksys is about the cloud, the price even includes a five-year Cloud Manager subscription.
Getting started is easy: you just need to provide an email address for the designated owner, add a password and choose a domain name, after which you can then set about defining networks for each site.
Provisioning the AP itself is just as swift, although before you start, we recommend that you visit the portal’s main settings page and change the default admin password for all managed APs. This should help ensure that mischief-makers can’t log in and mess with your settings.
With this done, all you need to do is type in the MAC address and serial number of the AP – both of which are conveniently detailed on the box, as well as on the underside of the unit itself, and within the AP’s local web interface. After about ten
seconds the AP should be detected, and you’ll be invited to set its name to something meaningful. Zero-touch provisioning is as simple as preassigning the appropriate SSIDs to your AP and dispatching it to the remote location. The recipient then simply needs to unbox the AP and connect it to the internet – the rest happens automatically. The Linksys Cloud Manager is also admirably versatile when it comes to setting up your SSIDs. You can create as many profiles as you like, and each AP can serve up to eight of them simultaneously. Encryption and SSID masking can be configured to suit your needs; you can also apply client isolation to stop users on the same SSID from seeing each other, restrict the number of clients that can
“You can create user accounts and grant them full portal access, or restrict them to managing specific networks”
associate, and enable 802.1lk for fast roaming as users move around the office. Bandwidth usage limits can be specified for each SSID in Mbits/sec. If you need a guest wireless network, that’s simple to create, too. It only takes a few clicks to enable a captive portal (or “splash page”) on selected SSIDs, which will be presented to users as soon as they connect. The page can be customised with a small company logo and acceptable use policy of up to 1,024 characters, and can optionally choose to require a global password. You can also set a standard landing page for guests to be redirected to once they’re connected. For day-to-day management, the portal’s overview page provides a real-time graph of upload and download traffic for each network over the last hour, day or week. You can view the busiest clients and APs, check wireless channel usage and access a Google map showing each AP’s physical location. This information can be opened up to other team members, too. You can create additional user accounts and grant them full portal access, or restrict them to managing or viewing settings for specific networks. There are, however, no granular controls to give access to particular functions. The LAPAC2600C did well in our performance tests. Real-world file copies over a 5GHz 802.11ac connection on a Windows 10 Pro desktop averaged 56MB/sec at close range, barely dropping to 53MB/sec at 10m. Coverage is also good, with our iPad only reporting a loss of signal after we had walked 44m down the main building corridor. For all of this, the Linksys LAPAC2600C is very reasonably priced. The company’s cloud portal isn’t the most sophisticated we’ve seen, but it’s very easy to use, making it ideal for small businesses wanting to expand their wireless network with hassle-free cloud management.
SPECIFICATIONS Wave 2 AC2600 dualband 2.4GHz/5GHz 802.11ac 4x4 MU-MIMO
internal aerials 2 x Gigabit Ethernet (LAN and PoE/PoE+) external power adapter included Kensington lock ceiling/wall mounting plates 243 x 237 x 44mm (WDH) 848g 5yr Cloud Manager subscription included limited lifetime warranty