Design and closer look

The TRENDnet TEW-826DAP is shipped in an elegant box that provides the product’s capabilities in detail. Since the intended audience for this product is geared towards commercial grade customers, this level of detail is probably overkill, yet you can’t complain for having too much detail now can you.

Opening up the box, you find the TEW-826DAP neatly packed along with a user guide, network cable and mounting brackets.

The access point offers 1 x Gigabit PoE+ LAN port and 1 x Gigabit LAN port along with a power switch and separate power input port. The POE port is quite common these days for commercial grade equipment due to its great versatility during installation.

The top of the access point has LED status lighting for power, each of the wireless bands and LAN connectivity. The lights can be turned off through the management console should you wish to do so.

The included mounting bracket allows you to install the TEW-826DAP in either a horizontal or vertical surface. Mounting the device is pretty straight forward and we didn’t have any issues or concerns during the physical connectivity of this device.

Features and Capabilities

The TRENDnet TEW-826DAP packs an impressive list of commercial grade features that one would look for in this type of wireless installation. We’ll break them down in detail;

Tri band WIFI

The device offers three WiFi bands that work simultaneously to maximize device networking speeds. The TEW-826DAP offers 2 x 5Ghz and 1 x 2.4Ghz bands which also allows you to segment your network to your desire as well. Utilizing the latest 802.11ac Wave 2 standard, the access point provides high data transmission speeds with seamless connectivity and a theoretical combined speed of 2,134 Mbps.

Each band allows you to have 8 independent SSIDs effectively enabling you to have 24 SSIDs in your environment. What’s more you can further customize each SSID with it’s own QOS setup.

Built For Busy Environments

With Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output technology allows the TEW-826DAP to process multiple data streams simultaneously; thus increasing the overakk WIFI performance in your environment. Effectively this technology allows you to serve more wireless clients without major infrastructure changes.

Band Steering

Another useful feature in a congested WIFI environment is band steering. What this technology does is that soon as it detects congestion in a particular WIFI band it’ll automatically transfer devices to a non congested WIFI band seamlessly to the user.

Central Management capability

Managing multiple access points in a large WIFI installation is a cumbersome task and highly susceptible to errors. This is where central management come in handy. The TEW-826DAP is compatible with TRENDnet’s TEW-WLC100 and TEW-WLC100P wireless controllers. These controllers are capable of managing upto 128 access points across your network. You can provision multiple access points simultaneously and reduce deployment times by creating specific group profiles that gets pushed across to connected devices by these controllers.

Pre-encrypted Wireless

At the time of shipping, TRENDnet encrypts the default WIFI SSIDs. The default user name and password which is common across all bands is clearly printed on the packaging.

Gigabit Ethernet ports

There are two Gigabit Ethernet ports offered on the TEW-826DAP. LAN1 is POE capable and connects the device to the main network while LAN2 allows you to connect another device that you want to be available on the network. It would have been nice if TRENDnet allowed to aggregate these ports for increased bandwidth should the network demand it; unfortunately this is not a feature that’s provided.

Captive Portal

You can have users connecting to the wireless network authenticate either through a radius server or user name/password that’s setup on the device itself. Granular control is given as to which SSID’s on each band participates in this service.

Schedule WIFI

Scheduling when a particular SSID is active and offline can be useful in certain environments. It also helps in reducing the overall power consumption of the device in the long run.

Table of contents

1. Introduction

2. Design and Features

3. Conclusion