mickevh
Distinguished Member
When planning Wi-Fi, it's a bit of a "rookie mistake" to plan for "an AP on each floor" as that almost invariable means you end up deploying your APs in "circulation" spaces (halls, landing, etc.) and that means all Wi-Fi transmission have to travel through at least one wall between clients and AP's.
Wi-Fi works best with unobstructed like of sight, so it's better to plan to deploy AP's where you expect people to spend most time doing their Wi-Fi'ing. So, lounge, den, bedrooms is better than halls and landings.
Of course, that may require more AP's and thus cost, so if you are on a budget, one AP in the middle of each floor may dictate placement, but that means signalling conditions will be sub-optimal.
You can do bit of heath robinson planning to illustrate this: Grab or create a floor plan for each level - it doesn't have to be super accurate, but it need to be reasonably to scale. Draw in the planned location for each AP. Then colour in the rooms depending on how many walls the transmissions need to pass through between clients and AP - green for no walls, orange for one wall, red for more than one wall. Then take a look to see where you "best" Wi-Fi coverage is and ask whether that's where you want it to be. You can then "play" with this a bit a see how changing AP positions (or deploying more of them) improves conditions in one area to the detriment of others and see what kind of plan you can come up with to deliver the best Wi-Fi experience for the money you are prepared to spend on AP's.
There are "proper" planning tools to do this that do the "colouring in" for you in real time as you drag APs around on screen, (and model the signal attenuation for the structures,) but for free you can mock it up a bit with a paint program, block in the walls and bucket fill the colours.
Wi-Fi works best with unobstructed like of sight, so it's better to plan to deploy AP's where you expect people to spend most time doing their Wi-Fi'ing. So, lounge, den, bedrooms is better than halls and landings.
Of course, that may require more AP's and thus cost, so if you are on a budget, one AP in the middle of each floor may dictate placement, but that means signalling conditions will be sub-optimal.
You can do bit of heath robinson planning to illustrate this: Grab or create a floor plan for each level - it doesn't have to be super accurate, but it need to be reasonably to scale. Draw in the planned location for each AP. Then colour in the rooms depending on how many walls the transmissions need to pass through between clients and AP - green for no walls, orange for one wall, red for more than one wall. Then take a look to see where you "best" Wi-Fi coverage is and ask whether that's where you want it to be. You can then "play" with this a bit a see how changing AP positions (or deploying more of them) improves conditions in one area to the detriment of others and see what kind of plan you can come up with to deliver the best Wi-Fi experience for the money you are prepared to spend on AP's.
There are "proper" planning tools to do this that do the "colouring in" for you in real time as you drag APs around on screen, (and model the signal attenuation for the structures,) but for free you can mock it up a bit with a paint program, block in the walls and bucket fill the colours.