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What to expect for Sophos Home XG users from Sophos Wireless (Wifi 6 etc)

Paul McGinnie

Hi - I am a long term Sophos Home XG user, who has been very happy using Sophos access points: AP30, AP100C and APX120, all managed from the firewall, which I find very convenient, as they integrate nicely. However, the Wifi 6 products are not being offered with firewall management. As I am managing only one location I have no need (and a preference not to need) any offsite control for onsite devices, so I have not tried any of the remote management options.

Should I infer that I will not be able to continue beyond Wifi 5 with my current approach, or will the Wifi 6 or 7 products eventually be manageable from the Home XG?

I suppose I am asking for some guidance about the direction of travel for Sophos support of this odd free software + 2nd hand hardware arrangement that I am very grateful to have been able to use. Is the intention to force all management onto the cloud? And will that come at a cost? I have no expectations of this being important to Sophos as it generates little revenue, but it lets me (and others) plan!

I know there is a "local management" option on the Wifi 6 devices, but once the close integration is broken, one may as well be using third party hardware, which is often better e.g. Wifi 6 for less cost that Sophos Wifi 5 - i think the integration is worth the hardware downgrade!

Regards,

     Paul McGinnie



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[edited by: Raphael Alganes at 2:42 PM (GMT -8) on 12 Jan 2024]
  • 0

    HI Paul,

    your only chance is to use Sophos Central or you manage all APs locally.

    You can use Sophos Central with the new AP6 - Series for free. :-)

    I have done the same.

    Regards

    Torsten

  • 0

    For paying customers it is the same. So don't expect any changes for home users.

    Sophos XG hardware would have been the last where you could have connected your APs to (except the APX120), on XGS hardware you would have been welcomed with a

    And not only this, the outdoor AP APX320X was the first model which is only controllable via Sophos Central.
    I would be very happy to be able to manage all APs on local firewalls but Sophos' way is the cloud.

    That they remove support for older models - ok, I could live with that and it is understandable if they do not support several things.
    But I'm afraid that in a few months or a new major release the Wireless management is completely removed from the software...

    Being a "jack-of-all-trades" was once a selling argument for the Sophos UTM, especially in small businesses or for home usage.

    Regards,

    Kevin

    Sophos CE/CA (XG, UTM, Central Endpoint)
    Gold Partner

  • 0 in reply to kerobra

    Supporting older models would be far less of a problem if Sophos wouldn't reinvent the wheel with every new AP generation and therefore need to implement separate management stacks for them. And it would probably help if they had a proper firmware development process instead of the ancient hacked together openwrt fork the ap and apx series uses. No idea what the AP6 use, as i don't own one and Sophos hasn't released the GPL sources yet.

    Sorry about the rant, but this is something that really annoys me. Especially since it also prevents backporting new features like WPA3 to older generations even if they would support it, and breaks roaming between them.

    Regards

    Fabian

  • 0 in reply to FabianGrossmann

    You can manage the new AP6 series by the management interface built into the AP. I am not sure what functionality is provided by the inbuilt interface.

    The worst point about the new management concept of cloud is you cannot see how the AP6 and the XGS interact.

    Ian

    XG115W - v20 GA - Home

    XG on VM 8 - v20 GA

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