Lotus Alpha is the indoor access point in the NetWave Wi-Fi family. It is a Wi-Fi 6 unit built for the ceilings, corridors and cabins of Indian enterprise buildings — offices, hotel guest floors, hospital wards, classrooms and retail floors — and it is managed from NetCloud Central, our AIOps cloud platform. This page is written for the people who actually have to live with the deployment: network engineers, IT heads, facilities leads and the integrators who install and support the estate.
Immunity Networks & Technologies Pvt Ltd has been building enterprise networking equipment since 2009. Our manufacturing sits at Sanand GIDC in Gujarat and our head office is at Powai, Mumbai. The Lotus Alpha indoor unit carries the model designation AX820 in our documentation and in older material on this site. If you have been sent a quotation referencing AX820, or you have arrived here from an older page, you are in the right place — this is the current, consolidated page for the indoor unit.
Wireless buying in India has changed. A decade ago the conversation was about coverage: put an access point in the corridor and see how far the signal reaches. Today the conversation is about capacity, about the density of clients per square metre, about how the wireless edge is authenticated and policed, and about who is accountable when a floor goes quiet at ten in the morning. Wi-Fi 6 exists because of that shift. The Lotus Alpha indoor access point is our answer to it, and the rest of this page explains where it fits, what it connects to, how to size a deployment, and — just as importantly — which questions you should be putting to us and to every other vendor in writing before you raise a purchase order.
An indoor access point is a ceiling-mounted device that has to work inside a volume of air that is full of obstructions. The plaster of a partition wall, the metal of a lift shaft, the glass of a meeting room, the water in a room full of people — all of these attenuate the signal, and they do so differently at 2.4 GHz and at 5 GHz. The practical consequence is that indoor coverage is not a circle drawn on a floor plan. It is a lobed, uneven shape that changes when the furniture changes.
Lotus Alpha is designed for the standard indoor mounting positions: false ceiling tile, concrete soffit, or a wall bracket where the ceiling is unavailable. The important design intent is downward and outward propagation from a ceiling position, which is why a unit mounted at desk height behind a metal cabinet will never perform the way the same unit performs on the ceiling six metres away. This sounds obvious. It is still the single most common cause of complaints we are called in to investigate after somebody else's installation.
The diagram above is a concept, not a prediction. The only reliable way to know how many units a floor needs, and where they go, is to survey it. We do predictive modelling from your architectural drawings and, where the building justifies it, a physical walk-through with measurement. If you would like the reasoning behind that process rather than just the output, our note on wireless site surveys and Wi-Fi planning sets out what a good survey report should contain and what you should refuse to accept.
You will notice that this page does not carry a specification table. That is deliberate. Radio specifications, port configurations, power draw and environmental ratings are model- and revision-specific, and a number printed on a marketing page in one quarter has a habit of being quoted back in a tender two years later against a unit that has since moved on. We would rather give you the capability picture here and confirm the figures for the exact model, in writing, against your requirement.
So, the capability picture. Lotus Alpha is a Wi-Fi 6 access point. Wi-Fi 6 matters indoors mainly for three reasons. First, scheduling: the access point can divide a transmission opportunity among several clients rather than serving them strictly one after another, which is what makes a room full of devices behave better than the same room did under earlier standards. Second, efficiency for battery-powered clients, which is what a ward full of nursing handhelds or a classroom full of tablets actually cares about. Third, better behaviour when neighbouring access points share a channel, which is the normal condition on any floor with more than a handful of units. If you want the underlying comparison written out plainly, read Wi-Fi 6 vs Wi-Fi 5 vs Wi-Fi 6E before you finalise your specification.
Here is what we suggest you ask us — and ask any vendor — to confirm on letterhead, per model, before you commit:
On the radio: which bands are supported and which channel widths are permitted for your site under Indian regulations; how the unit behaves when a channel is congested; what roaming assistance standards are supported and whether your client fleet actually uses them. On throughput and clients: the tested aggregate figures, the conditions under which they were measured, and the recommended client count per unit for your class of environment rather than a headline maximum. On power and cabling: the PoE standard and budget required per unit, whether an injector is needed or whether the switch will do it, and what happens on a constrained power budget. On the physical unit: dimensions, weight, mounting options, and the operating temperature and humidity range — the last one matters more than people expect in an Indian ceiling void above a kitchen or a plant room. On approvals: the specific certificate numbers held for the model you are buying, with dates.
We will answer all of that. What we will not do is publish a number here that we cannot stand behind for every revision of every unit in the field. Ask us to confirm current specifications in writing for the specific model, and we will send them as a signed document you can attach to your tender file.
An access point is not a product on its own. It is the visible end of a chain, and most of the pain in a wireless deployment comes from the parts of the chain nobody drew on the diagram. Lotus Alpha is designed to sit inside the Immunity stack, and the four relationships that matter are power, policy, management and uplink.
Power and access connectivity come from a NetForce switch in the floor rack. A single cable carries both data and power to the ceiling, which is why the switch specification and the access point specification have to be agreed together rather than separately. Our NetForce L2 access switches are the usual choice at the edge of a floor. If your edge switching is being tendered alongside the wireless, tell us — the port count, the PoE budget and the uplink capacity all fall out of the access point count, and sizing them in isolation is how projects end up short of ports in month three.
Policy, authentication and captive portal come from NetGuard controllers. This is where guest access is separated from staff access, where a hotel guest is handed a portal page and a hospital device is handed a segmented network, and where the rules about who may reach what are actually enforced. The access point advertises the SSIDs; the controller decides what those SSIDs mean.
Management and visibility come from NetCloud Central. Units are adopted into the platform, configuration is pushed from a template rather than typed into each box, firmware is managed centrally, and the operational picture — which units are up, which clients are attached, which parts of the floor are struggling — is available to whoever is on duty rather than only to the engineer who commissioned the site.
Uplinks between floors and buildings ride on fibre, and the transceivers are NetBeam optics. On a multi-storey building this is the part that decides whether your wireless design survives contact with the riser: copper between floor racks and the core is a false economy in most Indian commercial buildings, and the optics need to be specified at the same time as everything else.
Lotus Alpha comes in two variants and the choice between them is made more often on habit than on assessment. The rule is simpler than people make it: if the unit will be exposed to weather, to direct sun, to wind-blown dust, or to the temperature swings of an uncovered location, it is an outdoor deployment and it needs the Lotus Alpha outdoor unit. If the unit sits inside a conditioned or semi-conditioned building envelope, this indoor page is the right one.
The edge cases are where mistakes happen. A covered porch or a porte-cochère is outdoor: rain blows sideways and the humidity swing is real. A multi-level open car park is outdoor. A factory shed with open sides is outdoor. A warehouse with sealed walls but no air conditioning is a judgement call and depends on the ceiling temperature in May, which is why we ask for it. An atrium, a hotel lobby, a hospital corridor, a school block and a shop floor are all indoor. If you are covering a campus that has both — buildings plus the walkways between them — you will use both variants together, managed as one estate from the same cloud platform, and our campus wireless page covers that mixed pattern.
Cost is not the deciding factor and should not be. An outdoor-rated unit installed indoors is money spent on a rating you will never use. An indoor unit installed where water can reach it is a failure waiting for the first monsoon, and it will not be a warranty claim. Decide on exposure, then price.
Indoor deployments fall into three broad density patterns, and the number of access points a floor needs is driven far more by which pattern you are in than by the floor's area in square feet. An open office with low partitions is a propagation-friendly space where signal travels but where co-channel interference between your own units becomes the limiting factor. A partitioned floor of cabins and meeting rooms is the opposite: signal is blocked repeatedly, so you need more units at lower power, each serving a smaller area. A high-density room — an auditorium, a training hall, a large classroom, a conference space — is a third case entirely, where a modest floor area holds a very large number of simultaneous clients and the design is driven by capacity per unit rather than coverage.
Most real buildings are a mix of all three, floor by floor and sometimes wing by wing. That is exactly why a single "access points per thousand square feet" rule of thumb produces bad designs and unhappy users. It is also why the survey stage is not optional overhead — it is the stage that decides whether the estate works.
The RF problem here is your own network. Open-plan floors let signal travel further than you want, so units on the same channel hear each other and clients cling to a distant access point instead of the one overhead. The fix is disciplined channel and power planning, tighter cells than instinct suggests, and steering that encourages clients onto the correct band. Video calls, not file transfers, are the workload that exposes a lazy design. See our enterprise networking approach for how this fits a multi-site estate.
Guest floors are a corridor with load-bearing walls every few metres and a bathroom — tiled, plumbed, and RF-hostile — between the corridor and the bed. Corridor-only coverage reads fine on a survey and fails at the pillow. Density, guest expectations of streaming, and the need for a branded portal and per-room isolation make this a controller-led design. Our hotel Wi-Fi solutions page covers the guest experience and property-wide rollout.
Wards combine lead-lined and shielded rooms, dense metal fittings, trolleys that move, and a client mix ranging from clinical handhelds to patient phones. Coverage holes appear and disappear as beds and equipment are wheeled around, and clinical devices are unforgiving about roaming gaps. Segmentation between clinical, administrative and visitor traffic is mandatory rather than nice to have. See hospital Wi-Fi solutions for the ward-by-ward method.
The defining feature is synchronised demand: forty or a hundred devices all associating within the same two minutes, then all requesting the same resource at once. Average utilisation looks trivial; peak utilisation is brutal. Classroom blocks also stack vertically, so a unit on the second floor is heard on the first and third. Capacity-led design with tight cells and careful vertical planning is the answer, and it carries straight into wider campus wireless design.
Retail changes its own RF environment every season. Metal shelving, stock levels, promotional structures and refrigeration units all move, and the coverage that was verified at handover is not the coverage that exists at Diwali. Add point-of-sale terminals that must not drop, staff scanners, and customer guest access sharing the same air. Design for the fully-stocked worst case, not the empty showroom. Our retail Wi-Fi solutions page goes into store-format specifics.
Large indoor public spaces with high ceilings behave unlike an office: units are mounted far above the client, coverage cells overlap awkwardly, and the client population turns over completely every hour. Onboarding has to be fast and unattended, and the portal has to work on the first attempt for a user who will not try twice. Related patterns are covered on our airport Wi-Fi solutions page.
Lotus Alpha is designed and manufactured in India. Our factory is at Sanand GIDC in Gujarat and our engineering and support functions run from Powai, Mumbai. For most of our customers the practical value of that is not sentiment — it is lead time, spares availability, the ability to get a specific engineering question answered by the people who built the unit, and a supply chain that does not disappear when an overseas vendor reprioritises a region.
On approvals: Indian enterprise buyers increasingly require MTCTE and TEC certification and WPC approvals for radio equipment, and public-sector and regulated-sector tenders now frequently make these a qualifying condition rather than a preference. Our advice is the same regardless of who you buy from — do not accept a general statement that a vendor's range is approved. Ask for written, per-model confirmation naming the exact model and revision you are purchasing, with certificate numbers and validity dates, and attach it to your procurement file. We will provide that on request for the model quoted to you. You can read more about our approach on the certifications page, and ask us to confirm current specifications and approval status in writing for the specific model.
On commercials and delivery: Lotus Alpha is sold through our own team and through our channel. If you are an integrator, systems house or managed service provider looking to carry the range, the partners page sets out how that works. If you are an end customer with an existing integrator, we are happy to work through them. Either way, the fastest route to a useful answer is to send us the floor plans, the expected client counts and the applications that matter, and let us come back with a design and a bill of materials rather than a line item.
Tell us the building, the number of users and the applications that must not break. Our engineers in India will come back with an access point count, a placement plan, the matching NetForce switching and NetBeam optics, and a written specification confirmation for the exact model — usually within one business day.
Yes. AX820 is the model designation that has been used for the indoor Lotus Alpha access point across our site and documentation. If you have a quotation, drawing or older page referring to AX820, it refers to this indoor unit. This page consolidates the material that previously sat on separate thinner pages. For the exact model and revision being quoted to you, ask us to confirm current specifications in writing.
Because specifications are model- and revision-specific and a published figure tends to outlive its accuracy. Throughput, spatial streams, client counts, PoE budget, antenna characteristics, operating temperature and physical dimensions are all confirmed to you in writing against the specific model on your quotation. That document is what you should attach to a tender file, not a web page. Ask us to confirm current specifications in writing for the specific model.
Through NetCloud Central, our AIOps cloud platform. Units are adopted into the platform, configuration is applied from templates rather than device by device, firmware is managed centrally, and the operational view of the estate is available to your whole operations team. Policy, authentication and captive portal behaviour are handled in conjunction with NetGuard controllers.
The unit is powered over Ethernet from the access switch, which is normally a NetForce L2 unit in the floor rack. Whether an injector is needed depends on the switch you already have and its available power budget. This is one of the items we confirm in writing per model, because getting it wrong shows up as units that boot but behave oddly under load rather than as a clean failure.
Yes, and on most campuses you will. The outdoor Lotus Alpha covers walkways, courtyards, car parks and exposed areas; the indoor unit covers the buildings. Both sit in the same managed estate. The campus wireless page describes how a mixed indoor and outdoor design is planned as one system rather than two projects.
There is no honest answer without a survey. The number is driven by construction, partitioning, client density, the applications in use and the ceiling height — not by floor area alone. We do predictive design from your drawings and, where the building justifies it, physical measurement. Our note on wireless site surveys and Wi-Fi planning explains what the resulting report should contain.
It depends on client density and client mix rather than on headline speed. In a lightly loaded space the difference is modest; in a room full of simultaneous devices it is substantial, and the battery-life and scheduling benefits matter for handheld and tablet fleets. Read Wi-Fi 6 vs Wi-Fi 5 vs Wi-Fi 6E before you write the specification, and factor in how long the estate has to last.
Indian enterprise buyers increasingly require MTCTE and TEC certification and WPC approvals for radio equipment, and many tenders now treat them as qualifying conditions. Ask any vendor — including us — for written, per-model confirmation naming the exact model and revision, with certificate numbers and validity dates, rather than a general statement about a product range. See the certifications page and ask us to confirm the current position in writing for your model.