Overall and Final Verdict
As a first look at what Zyxel has to offer the NWA220AX-6E AXE5400 WiFi 6E Access Point is an interesting one to go with. It gave me a good chance to check out their Nebula Control Center software which is a cloud-based software that ties in with the NWA220AX-6E and gives you both a web interface and a phone app to set up and control your Zyxel hardware. Not everyone is all about using the cloud and there are a few downsides but it does make your setup as easy as it can get, especially if you are configuring more than one product which for a lot of business hardware you would be. You can set things up once and it will propagate across all of the access points you add to the system. That could add up to a significant amount of time and effort saved. Being able to access things from anywhere can be nice as well. The only downsides that I ran into revolve completely around the pro upgrade license options. There is a whole list of different licenses that you can get which depend on what hardware you are running and what features you want. I’m not a big fan of licenses in general, I would much rather pay for it all upfront from the start but at a minimum, it should be easy to know what I need, one simple option would be an improvement at least. They do have some features that are worth the upgrade, especially on the security side with DNS and phishing protection for example, and a lot more.
Hardware wise the NWA220AX-6E has a 2.5G wired connection and you also get a passthrough 1 gig ethernet connection as well. It doesn’t pass through PoE but you could utilize it to hook something up in that area if needed. Otherwise, this is a standard ceiling-mountable 4x4 radio access point. It supports 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz or 6 GHz. The wording there is very important, you can only use 5 GHz or 6 GHz, not both at once. They are really clear about this in all of the listings I have seen at least but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone was caught off guard by it. So why would you want that? If I were laying out a new network I would want support for both but if you just wanted to add 6 GHz support to an already setup network this would be perfect. It could also be great if you know your network needs and know that your devices will support 6 GHz and need the extra bandwidth that you can get. This does limit the number of use cases though, Zyxel does have other access points for more standard uses. Performance on 5GHz and 6GHz was great in my testing as well.
For pricing the NWA220AX-6E has an MSRP of $169.99 and I’m seeing it for even less, Amazon has it for $149.99 right now. Comparing the price here to something like the EnGenius ECW336 is night and day, you could get four NWA220AX-6E for the same price and still have money leftover still. That does make it a great option for someone looking to just add in 6GHz coverage for even faster performance on an existing network.
Live Pricing: HERE
