Office Wi-Fi that survives a full room

The complaint is always the same: the internet is slow. The cause is almost never the internet connection.

Coverage is not capacity

A single powerful access point can cover an entire floor and still fail forty people, because every device shares the airtime. One access point talking to forty clients spends most of its time managing conversations rather than moving data.

More, smaller cells beat one large one. That means several access points at reduced transmit power, not one turned up to maximum.

The mistakes that cause most complaints

• Consumer equipment in a business setting. A domestic router handles a household, not a meeting room.
• Transmit power at maximum. Devices then cling to a distant access point instead of switching to the near one.
• The 2.4 GHz band left wide open. Three non-overlapping channels, shared with every microwave and neighbour. Use it for equipment that needs it, and push everything else to 5 or 6 GHz.
• One network for everything. Guests, laptops, phones, cameras and the till on the same segment.
• No survey. Access points placed where cabling was convenient rather than where people sit.

What a proper deployment looks like

• A survey before installation, and a verification survey after
• Access points positioned for the seating plan, including the meeting rooms
• Separate networks for staff, guests and devices, kept apart at the network level
• Central management, so a firmware update is one action rather than eleven
• Wired backhaul to every access point

The test that matters

Do not test at eight in the morning from a desk next to the cabinet. Test in the far meeting room, at the busiest hour, on a video call, while somebody uploads a large file. That is the condition your Wi-Fi has to survive, and it is the only test that predicts complaints.

See our approach to networks and Wi-Fi.