Hands On: Luxul XAP-1500 Wireless Access Point

Luxul’s new XAP-1500 wireless access point offers wireless connectivity via the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency bands.

This may be reaching a little too far back, but back in the early days of the Internet and networking, residential networking products were much different than commercial products.

More recently, the lines between residential and commercial network gear have blurred due to the public’s ever-increasingly appetite to stay connected.

Helping to blur those lines between markets are manufacturers like Luxul, who at one time developed products for the commercial market, but now targets both the residential custom installation market and traditional commercial markets with its line of routers, access points, switches and other connectivity solutions.

One of the company’s latest products is its XAP-1500 wireless access point (WAP). This network extension product can be used in residential and commercial environments to increase the footprint and throughput of wireless networks to allow everything from computers and smart devices to printers and other devices to reliably reside on a network of varying sizes.

Features

Among the options incorporated into the XAP-1500 WAP are the ability to run concurrent dual bands of wireless on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz spectrums, and a total power output of 1,000mW for increased coverage.

Luxul says the WAP is also capable of delivering data transfer capabilities up to 900Mbps of data, and it provides VLAN support for the creation of secure guest network connections.

Related: More on Networking from Commercial Integrator

In addition, the dealer friendly WAP includes the ability to set up via a single cable connection through its included PoE injector. Luxul also points out the versatile product can be wall or ceiling mounted, or placed on a desk or tabletop.

Setup

Outside of the networking professional community no one really looks forward to hooking up networking gear. Eradicating the fear of networking, the XAP-1500 is about as turnkey as it gets.

Running a Cat-5 cable, my existing Luxul network switch to the “Data In” port of the WAP’s power supply I then ran another Cat-5 cable from the WAP’s “Data and Power Out” port on the power supply to the WAP.

That was pretty much it. I located the WAP behind a flat-panel display in my home and plugged in the power. I verified the XAP-1500’s default IP address through the LAN Scan app on my MacBook Pro and then plugged that IP address into my browser to configure the WAP.

After setting the security parameters for both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz, I verified the WAP’s firmware and rebooted it to save its settings.  All of this was done painlessly within minutes.

Performance

I want to point out that obviously this install was done in a residence and my network already featured several Luxul components. Having the Luxul components in place validates the turnkey nature of the XAP-1500 when used as part of a complete Luxul-based network. The company supports this activity with its iOS app that is designed to facilitate the install and management processes of its devices.

Having said all of that, I won’t claim my network is the size of a large office environment, but it does have about 20 devices on it. More specifically my network is home to multiple computers, network switches, Apple TVs, smart Blu-ray players and A/V receivers, and iOS products.

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