Wifi Signal Challange - 5 Floor Building

[Asad]

Hi Eveyrone,

I have work for a company that wants me to improve the signal throughout the 5 floor building with 30 rooms, its quite a old building with thick walls. I have tried putting couple of Access points but still getting complaints from the tenants.

What is the best and affordable way to improve wifi signal?

I was thinking of repeaters. but was confused if the repeaters can repeat from a repeates since the router is only in the basement.

BTW the max internet speed in the area is 13MB.

Thanks in advance,
Asad

 

[beers]

What equipment do you have currently?

Have you done a site survey and heatmapped out where you might be having holes in coverage?

 

[Geoff]

For a 5 floor, 30 room building you will need an enterprise level WiFi solution. You will not be able to get by with one wireless router in the basement with multiple repeaters, let alone consumer grade equipment.

I'm a big fan of Ubiquity equipment. I'd get an EdgeRouter, and either an EdgeSwitch PoE (or a combined EdgeRouter with POE if you only need a few APs, which is unlikely), and run CAT6 throughout the building to provide backhaul to the Ubiquity UniFi access points. How many of these and the type you need vary greatly, from the dimensions of the rooms and buildings, to the type of construction material, and with what sort of service you are expected to provide such as streaming video, VoIP wireless phones, or just general internet access.

I would start off with getting a blue print of the building and determine wall material, use the "AP on a stick" approach to gather heat map samples, then use site survey and prediction software to determine AP placement. Once you have the number of APs figured out, you need to coordinate channel planning among your APs and any surrounding APs.