Planning office Wi-Fi: choosing and placing access points correctly

Why consumer routers fail in the office

A single Wi-Fi router is built for a flat: one device, one location, few users. In the office there are concrete walls, glass fronts, many simultaneous devices and requirements such as a separate guest Wi-Fi. When several consumer routers are then combined as repeaters, networks with the same name emerge that interfere with each other and between which devices do not switch cleanly.

Professional access points are managed centrally via a controller, coordinate channels and transmit power, hand over devices seamlessly and separate networks via VLANs. They cost €100 to €250 per device, hardly more than a good consumer router.

Site survey: floor plan, walls, interference

It starts with the question of where how much Wi-Fi is needed. Meeting rooms with 20 devices need more capacity than a warehouse aisle. Reinforced concrete, metal shelving, metal-coated glass and lift shafts attenuate the signal strongly. Microwaves, Bluetooth devices and neighbouring offices interfere on 2.4 GHz. A measurement on site with the floor plan shows where access points really belong, instead of mounting them wherever a socket happens to be.

How many access points do you need?

As a rule of thumb, one access point in office environments covers about 100 to 150 square metres and 30 to 50 active devices. An office over two floors with 25 employees usually needs three to four devices. More important than the area is density: a training room with 30 notebooks needs its own device even if the area is small.

Frequency bands and channels

• 2.4 GHz: long range, but only three non-overlapping channels and a lot of interference; for IoT devices and printers, not for workstations
• 5 GHz: the standard for notebooks and smartphones, many channels, less interference, shorter range
• 6 GHz (Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7): plenty of free bandwidth, only with new devices, useful at high density
• Enable band steering in the controller so devices prefer 5 and 6 GHz
• Do not set transmit power to maximum: access points that are too strong prevent devices from switching to the closer one

Guest Wi-Fi, security and separation

Guests and private devices of employees never belong in the company network. A guest Wi-Fi with its own VLAN, bandwidth limit and client isolation is set up in minutes with professional systems. For employees, WPA3 or at least WPA2 with a long password is mandatory, in larger environments authentication with personal credentials via RADIUS, so that the password does not have to be changed for everyone when an employee leaves. Point-of-sale systems, printers and cameras get their own device network.

Which vendors have proven themselves

For small and medium-sized companies Ubiquiti UniFi and TP-Link Omada have proven themselves: centrally managed, good value for money, reliable roaming. MikroTik is inexpensive and very flexible but requires networking knowledge. Aruba Instant On and Cisco Meraki are the enterprise variants with ongoing licence costs. What matters is less the brand than clean planning and configuration.

Planning checklist

• Floor plan with wall materials, workstations and meeting rooms
• Number of simultaneous devices per area, including smartphones and IoT
• Network cable with PoE to every access point location, ceiling mounting preferred
• Separate networks: employees, guests, devices, each with its own VLAN
• Controller operation: local, on the NAS or in the cloud
• Post-installation measurement and fine tuning of channels and power

Frequently asked questions