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Summary: great value product, with a few drawbacks that are entirely acceptable at this price point.

I bought one of these to extend the home network in a large-ish house, attracted by its neat appearance, PoE capability and good reviews.

Hardware and software installation were straightforward. The controller software looked like bloatware at first glance, but in fact is excellent - does exactly what you need, and gets out of the way when you don't need it. I don't need hotspot/portal functionality so there is no need to run the controller software 24/7 - the AP just gets on with its business unaided.

Going for a business-grade product has been great for me - the price is reasonable, and already there are features I'm using that I would not get with consumer-type products: guest internet access isolated from my LAN, for example.

Two very minor disappointments. First. the unit was a little larger than I had hoped (about 25cm diameter) but that's not a big problem because its appearance is very neat. Second, I put this near a large glass sliding window in the hope of getting access anywhere in the garden, but the real range is only about 25 meters after closing the double-glazed doors. I wonder if the modern thermally-efficient glass has some metallization or other conductive coating that causes significant attenuation?

Anyhow, I'm a convert; I'll now also buy a "long range" version to cover the garden, and put this one at the other end of the house in place of my existing downmarket AP.

One word of warning: although the wireless performance seems good, there's no way you'll get 300 Mbps in practice because it has only a 100Mbps Ethernet uplink! The much more expensive Pro version has twin GbE links... I wonder why? :-)

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