Common Wi-Fi design mistakes in small offices

The most common Wi-Fi project we are called in to fix is the one where someone added another access point because the existing one was slow. More often than not, the second access point made the problem worse. The reason is that coverage and capacity are different design problems.

Coverage vs capacity

Coverage answers the question "can a device see an access point at all?" Capacity answers the question "how many devices can that access point serve at once?" A crowded office with forty staff on laptops, phones, printers and VoIP handsets does not have a coverage problem. It has a capacity problem. Adding another access point that services the same band makes the airwaves busier, not quieter.

The mistakes we see

• Consumer routers in business settings. A $200 home router is not designed to carry forty concurrent clients.
• Access points in the wrong place. Mounted in the cupboard, behind metal cabinets, or above the drop ceiling where the signal has to pass through plaster and steel.
• One SSID for everything. Staff, guests, printers, cameras and VoIP handsets on the same wireless network with no segmentation.
• Auto-channel selection with no survey. Leaving channel selection to the device works in an apartment building about as well as you would expect.
• No cabling back to the switch. Access points powered by Wi-Fi extenders rather than Ethernet run at half speed.

What a proper design looks like

A proper office Wi-Fi design starts with a site survey. We walk the floor with a spectrum analyser, map existing coverage and interference, and then position access points to carry the expected client density. Each access point is cabled back to a managed switch. SSIDs are separated: staff on one VLAN, guests on another, printers and IoT on a third. Channels are set to avoid overlap with neighbouring networks.

"It worked last week" is not a Wi-Fi design. It is a coincidence between your access point and your building.

When to call us

If your office has more than twenty wireless devices, if meetings drop on video calls, or if the reception area has better coverage than the desk three metres away, the problem is not the internet. It is the wireless design.