Wi-Fi Coverage for Offices | Falcon Security Systems

Why office Wi-Fi is a coverage problem, not a router problem

When office Wi-Fi is poor, the instinct is to buy a more powerful router. This rarely works, because the limit is not the router's transmit power — it is that a laptop across the office cannot transmit back strongly enough. The connection shows full bars and behaves badly.

The correct approach is several access points at modest power rather than one strong one, positioned so that every working area is close to one. In a typical office with block walls, that means one access point per two or three rooms, wired back to the switch. Wireless repeaters are a poor substitute because they halve throughput and add latency at every hop.

The second thing to get right is channels. In a building where several offices each run their own network, everyone is on the same few channels and interfering. Setting fixed, non-overlapping channels on your access points and using the 5GHz band for anything that matters resolves more complaints than adding hardware.

For any office of size, run cable to each access point position. Wi-Fi is a wireless service delivered over a wired backbone — every serious deployment is wired to the access point and wireless only for the last few metres.