Page 2 - Physical Look - Hardware
Like most mesh routers, the EnGenius ESR580 is intended to be placed around the house for the best distribution of Wi-Fi signal. Thus, these units are meant to be smaller in size and hopefully fit into your daily living area. As you can see, each ESR580 node is a cylinder-like shape with a slightly increased diameter closer to the base of the unit. The whole unit is made out of glossy plastic and feels solid. I do not generally like the glossy look, as it can easily retain fingerprints or handling marks and I would have preferred a matte finish instead. However, the white finish does look modern and should blend in most people's homes. The top is flat with a gray EnGenius logo in the middle of each node. On the edge of the EnGenius ESR580, we have a notch for an LED indicator. This indicates the status of each particular unit. This can vary between a solid or flashing white, yellow, or blue color, each with their own meaning depending on the context.
As these are meant to be placed around the house, the EnGenius ESR580 should also have a relatively small footprint. In terms of dimensions, each cylindrical unit is approximately 126mm in diameter at its widest point and 58mm in height. It is nice to see this unobtrusive size, although we have seen both larger and smaller mesh nodes from other manufacturers. Each unit houses a Qualcomm quad-core processor, presumably the IPQ4018, running at 717MHz. Each ESR580 unit has two internal antennas. You might be wondering, why do we need two antennas? The first reason is the fact the EnGenius ESR580 system requires extra antennas to communicate with each other over a wireless backhaul. On the client side, the use of multiple antennas for communications has been the foundation of many modern wireless technologies; ranging from short range unlicensed bands such as Wi-Fi to long range licensed bands like 5G cell phone networks. The fundamental principle lies in the fact that multiple antennas allow the designer to enhance performance using beamforming and diversity techniques. Beamforming, in the simplest explanation, allows power to be directed towards a certain direction. Diversity exploits multipath -- where the same signal can arrive via different paths due to reflection and refraction in the propagation channel -- to enhance the received signal quality. Multi-user MIMO, otherwise called MU-MIMO, lets multiple antennas from multiple users to communicate with multiple antennas on base station. Obviously, the more antennas on the access point the better, but we are bound by the laws of diminishing returns.
Each EnGenius ESR580 node is an AC2200 wireless access point. This operates at 400Mbps on the 2.4GHz band via one 40MHz channel with two streams, while two 80MHz channel with two streams on the 5GHz band provides 867Mbps for a total of 2200Mbps theoretical throughput. We will evaluate the performance of the mesh system shortly.
Flipping to the bottom, you can see we actually have no ventilation holes on the ESR580 at all, which means these units can get a bit warm to the touch. Three rubber feet are around the bottom of the ESR580 to provide some clearance and stability for where these nodes will sit. At the bottom, we have a 12V DC power input, Gigabit uplink WAN port, Gigabit Ethernet port, and a USB 3.1 Type-A port. The power supply that connects here is an external brick with a product number ZZU1588-150120-2A and it is made in China. This is a 12V power supply specified for up to 1.5A of current. This means it can deliver a maximum wattage of 18W. Two mounting holes are located on the bottom, which will let you wall-mount the ESR580 system if you so desire. In the middle of the base is a label showing information like the serial number, default SSIDs, and default Wi-Fi password. You probably will want to change your password and SSID, which is possible using the web configuration interface, but you will start off with these configuration settings. Otherwise, on the edge of the ESR580 is a reset pin hole switch to force a reset of the settings on each node.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. Physical Look - Hardware
3. Configuration and User Interface
4. Performance Tests
5. Conclusion
