What Does Professional Wi-Fi in a Workplace Cost

Square metres say little about how many access points a site needs. What matters is how many devices are transmitting at once — laptops, handheld scanners, mobile registers, IP phones — and how demanding their connection has to be.

Construction matters too: concrete ceilings, steel shelving in a warehouse, or the insulation of a cold store weaken the signal so much that two rooms of identical size can need a completely different number of access points. Thick walls in an older building count too.

A laptop at a desk barely notices a brief handoff to the next access point. A handheld scanner on the warehouse floor or an IP phone mid-call needs that handoff to be seamless, or the connection — or the call — drops.

That changes the planning: seamless roaming needs more overlap between access points and consistent configuration, which means more hardware and more tuning effort than Wi-Fi that only has to serve laptops.

Every access point needs power and a network connection, usually over PoE. If the existing switches can't deliver PoE or don't supply enough power per port, they have to be replaced — a line item that's often missing from Wi-Fi quotes because it isn't the access point itself.

Cable routes to the mounting points matter too: an access point on a warehouse ceiling needs a run to get there, and that run is rarely where it would be cheapest.

A Wi-Fi survey measures actual signal strength in the space instead of estimating it from a floor plan. That costs time before planning starts, but it prevents dead spots showing up after installation that then need extra access points bolted on — often in harder-to-reach spots and without the original channel plan.

Anyone who plans without a survey pays the difference twice: once for the original, undersized access point count, and again for the retrofit plus new cable runs. Ongoing care afterwards — firmware, channel planning, capacity as device count grows — is the last item that often gets overlooked.