The first step to a great wireless network is a great design. A Wi-Fi design serves as a blueprint for your wireless network, and by taking the time to understand the components of a great design and following best practices, you’ll not only increase the reliability and performance of your network, you’ll also save money by not overspending on unnecessary network infrastructure.
What is Wi-Fi-Design?
Wi-Fi design is the process of taking your business’ requirements for wireless connectivity and turning them into a high-performing and reliable Wi-Fi network. It’s the translation of your business needs — how many devices need Wi-Fi (capacity) and where they need it (coverage) — into a deployment plan detailing how many access points you’ll need, where they need to be installed, and how they should be configured in order to satisfy the demands of your users. The end result is reliable Wi-Fi for all of the devices and applications on your network — and happy employees and customers.
Why WiFi-Design Matters?
Wireless networks are like electricity in today’s business world. When Wi-Fi is down, work stops. A bad design can not only negatively impact performance today, but it can also have lingering effects, making it more difficult to troubleshoot and fix problems later. Costly outages, loss of revenue, and lack of productivity may all result from bad Wi-Fi design.
Professional Wi-Fi design tools let you model and validate your design’s effectiveness and ensure it will achieve high performance from day one and allow you to iterate and optimize to account for changes to your requirements over time. When you create your wireless network design — and you get it right the first time — you drastically improve overall Wi-Fi performance.
Good Wi-Fi is good for business. Wi-Fi is a part of nearly every mission-critical application used in business — from self-driving forklifts in warehouses to the fleet of laptops and phones deployed throughout your organization. It’s in the life-sustaining medical devices we rely on for health and wellness. It keeps us connected when we need to communicate and collaborate, and it gives us an escape when we need to isolate.
You only notice Wi-Fi when it isn’t working. We have all experienced the frustration of poor-performing Wi-Fi networks. Globally, 200 million wireless networks have been reported as poor performing — unable to meet their requirements for overall coverage and capacity with minimal interference. One of the biggest reasons Wi-Fi networks are poor performing is due to poor Wi-Fi design. As people and organizations come to rely more and more heavily on Wi-Fi networks, the risk of their failure becomes increasingly serious.
Well-designed wireless networks are easier to troubleshoot and fix. Awesome Wi-Fi starts with an Ekahau design — which not only establishes a great baseline for your network, it makes it easy to perform regular health checks and spot interferers before they become massive issues.
This article was featured in the Ekahau Blog, Wi-Fi Design Best Practices [2022 Guide], here we visit the importance of defining network requirements when designing a high-performing Wi-Fi network. All too often, networks fail to meet requirements due to an incomplete discovery process.