Wi-Fi Decoded: Wireless Design Best Practices | Ekahau Webinar

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Welcome, welcome, ladies and gentlemen.

[00:00:02]Join us for our Ekahau webinar today.

[00:00:04]The plan this year is to start a webinar series, and this is the first of the the five-part series that we plan on doing.

[00:00:11]Uh it's a series called Wi-Fi Deconstructed, and today we'll be talking about wireless design best practices.

[00:00:20]And you have myself and Troy. We both look after product marketing and ECSE over here at Ekahau. Stew, who is heads up our community engagement, and Dale, our sales engineer. And Troy mentioned that this is going to be uh one of five series, you said, right?

[00:00:34]That's right. Uh again, the first part is uh focusing on Wi-Fi design, uh but to kind of set the stage for future Wi-Fi Deconstructed webinars, we'll also be focusing drilling down into site surveys, how to optimize and improve your Wi-Fi performance, how to troubleshoot and find the root cause of those issues that slows down devices or you find devices struggling to get connected to Wi-Fi, and last but not least, uh we'll also be focusing on security, right? Which should be a core requirement of every uh project.

[00:01:08]Yeah, and um me and Troy, whilst we were putting this uh content together for the webinar today, we had uh such a great discussion about what are the what are the fundamental things that someone would need to know to be able to design a Wi-Fi network. And we broke it down into three kind of like categories and or buckets. Uh the first one being that you have have a core foundational level of understanding how RF works from the different frequency bands we can use, the different channels that you can and you can't use, especially in certain different regions, the uh difference between designing for a a Wi-Fi 4 5 network or Wi-Fi 6 versus a Wi-Fi 7 if you've got access to the 6 GHz frequency bands, are you going to use omnidirectional antennas, are you going to use directional antennas, when should you use one versus the other, understanding the difference between what you set a transmit power of your radio to be versus the actual total EIRP, and then moving on to that second bucket, it's really key to understand the exact customer stakeholders desired outcome for the Wi-Fi network, but you also need to understand the unique environment in terms of the uh materials that are going to be on site, different uh attenuation they might cause, the different AP manufacturers, and the different options you have there, the um potential location for mounting your access points and antennas. You may be restricted around aesthetics. You might have some unavoidable interference in the environment, which we'll touch on a little bit later on that you may have to design your network around. Uh security can be a big thing, too. And then finally, you need to know how to use the tool. So, if you're going to be using uh Ekahau to design your network in a traditional predictive modeling way, if you want to use measured data to some planning or upgrading, understanding how to calculate capacity in a way that makes sense that you don't over-engineer your design for too many access points.

[00:03:00]And then finally, ensuring that when you deploy and configure your wireless networks, that they're in line with how you designed your uh RF network. And now, a little disclaimer here, we cannot teach you all of this in 1 hour. We will try and cover as much as we can, but if uh designing Wi-Fi networks is something that you're very serious and passionate about, then we would strongly recommend that you check out our ECSE design course, where we've got 4 days of training assigned to be able to teach you everything that you would need to know to design a Wi-Fi network. So, let's start with uh section one, the fundamentals, Troy.

[00:03:33]Actually, before we jump into that, I just want to emphasize, too, Matt went through a very uh thorough list of a lot of concepts that you need to understand for RF design or Wi-Fi design, but really it it focuses more on the RF side of things, right? So, that kind of that wireless gap between a client device and the access point. In order for your Wi-Fi design to be successful, there's a whole bunch of other, for lack of a better term, let's call it back-end uh components that you need to address as well. Things like uh DHCP uh scoping size, uh how long those addresses last, making sure DNS and your VLANs are all set up. So, there's there's a whole bunch more uh to think about when putting together a complete and functional Wi-Fi setup. Uh we're just going to focus on the the RF side of things.

[00:04:17]Right? And in that uh that concept, uh the first thing that we just want to talk about here is the idea of free space path loss, right? Now, this is a fundamental concept in signal propagation, right? Any transmitting radio, which uh you can think of as an access point, but it could also be from the client's end as well. Any device that's transmitting or sending out power, that energy will decay or attenuate as it travels through free space, right? So, in an empty field out in the middle of nowhere, that signal will get weaker and weaker and weaker as that signal propagates out from the transmitting source, right? And the bulk of your energy is lost in about the first meter, right? So, you're looking at upwards of 80% of the energy decaying following an exponential curve as it radiates out from that device, right? And you can calculate uh how much energy uh is lost in this free space path loss. There's a formula out there or on the slide. Uh there's two variables that uh contribute to this formula. Uh one is distance, which is the D, and the other is F, which represents frequency. So, as a function of the uh increasing or decreasing distance and the specific frequency that you're looking at, that's what you can use to calculate the free space path loss. And one important thing to think about is it doesn't matter what antenna you use.

[00:05:43]The shape or directionality of the antenna does not impact uh the attenuation of of this curve in this graph, right? So, that's something to to think about and be aware of.

[00:05:54]Okay?

[00:05:54]Uh and as that signal propagates, uh I I used the example of open space free pa- uh um uh in in a field, um but if you're in an office environment or a warehouse or a hospital, uh anything where there's attenuating uh surfaces or materials, as that signal propagates out, you'll run into a warehouse shelf or a wall. And so, in our models where used to predict the theoretical attenuation or signal propagation, we'll add in the attenuation or signal loss that'll be accounted for in that material, and we'll subtract that out from the free space loss as we build our model. And then we create these models in three dimensions, right? So, we're modeling signals going up and down through walls, through floors. Uh we can also include things like reflection and diffraction uh to make it more accurate. But all these calculations go in it um and we we can perform these calculations and crunch numbers very quickly and then easily generate a heat map to make it very convenient for the humans to look at and analyze what's going on.

[00:06:58]Yeah, and on the subject of of the heat map, when you see the signal being uh generated for you in in tools like Ekahau, what you would typically have is a heat map legend that will show you anything between 0 to -67 as green, uh between -67 to -85 as gray, and then anything after that as white. And we also refer to that as the one don't want and don't care uh kind of ranges, because if you have signal that can be heard by your client devices within this threshold, typically they're going to be able to have uh good signal strength, good SNR, good MCS rates, be able to have good connectivity and perform well doing the applications you would like them to do. This kind of gray area is where things start to drop off a bit and they don't work quite as well. Also, if there are other access points or clients sharing the same channel that can be heard above this threshold, you effectively take it in turns to access the the medium. And then anything after this, it doesn't affect that uh channel interference uh decision-making for access points or clients to make a decision on on who can take the the turn to access the medium. And uh so, that's probably kind of referred to as our don't care area. And then if we just have a quick comparison between the frequency bands 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz. So, 2.4 GHz is um a very limited spectrum, has uh probably that what we would refer to as our three non-overlapping channels. Yes, in some places you could have four, but typically we stick to three.

[00:08:21]You're going to have most likely have IoT devices operating here. There's a lot of uh non-Wi-Fi devices that operate in this frequency band, so think of that Bluetooth, microwave, uh video cameras, etc., etc. Uh 5 GHz has a uh bigger pool of spectrum that we can use, and uh we don't have quite so much interference that we do in the 2.4 GHz frequency band. However, there still is some, and there are some rules that we need to take into consideration with some of those 5 GHz channels, especially around the something that's called DFS.

[00:08:52]So, it's something that is really important for you to be aware of. And then 6 GHz, this is the latest frequency band that we have got given access to, and depending on where you are designing or deploying your Wi-Fi networks, you have access to either more or the same amount of spectrum that we did in 5 GHz.

[00:09:08]And there are a lot of other things to consider when it comes to 6 GHz with device classification, indoor outdoor rules. Um so, that's something for you to really be aware of. And we have different Wi-Fi standards that are supported in the different frequency bands. So, this is one of the things that we think is really valuable that you understand, um but we're not going to dive too deep into it the difference between each frequency band on the webinar today.

[00:09:31]So, another thing that we wanted to uh mention quickly that is important when it comes to your designs is understanding something that's called EIRP. And we could start a little bit of a debate in the chat, I think, Troy, what the E stands for. Is it equivalent or effective?

[00:09:51]>> effective?

[00:09:53]So, the E could be equivalent or effective, depending on who you ask. And then the I is isotropic radiated power.

[00:10:00]And effectively, what we wanted to to bring this out is be mention this and bring this up today is because what I personally used to struggle with and understand was getting my head around EIRP as I "What do you mean if I configure the transmit power of my radio at 14 dBm, but actually the EIRP is now 17 or 20, and maybe that exceeds the regulatory domain requirements for where I'm designing for?" So, in a simplified way of explaining this, what you you have a a radio in an access point, and you also have an antenna. You can configure the transmit power of the radio to be a certain level, let's say 14 dBm. Now, the antenna is typically going to add something that's called a passive gain to the uh to the antenna, which you then combine the transmit power of the radio. So, let's say you configure the radio at 14 dBm, you add a passive gain antenna of 3 dBi, that means your EIRP now is going to be 17. And this is something that you really need to take into consideration a bit more when you're using access points with, let's say, directionality, because typically they have a higher gain, which means that total EIRP is going to be significantly higher. And there are a lot of other variable factors here with cable MIMO chains that can affect the EIRP. So, again, that this is something that you need to be aware of because it can take your designs from potentially working and looking very good to if you haven't factored in this EIRP for where you're designing for, it could take them out of compliance. So, again, something for you to be aware of, and we're going to talk a little bit more about some antenna fundamentals now. So, back over to you, Troy.

[00:11:35]Yeah. So, with that segue, we have a picture here to kind of present to the concept as a high level, right? So, the idea here is to control and direct your RF energy where it's needed. So, if you were to think about lights in a street and light pollution, which really angers a lot of the astronomers who are trying to study the stars and search for those hidden planets, if there's too much light, it kind of increases your noise floor, adds to that light pollution. We have the same problem when it comes to RF design and and Wi-Fi design. Right?

[00:12:06]So, a poor choice or a very bad choice here would be a pure omnidirectional antenna, which is a very excellent representation of an isotropic antenna.

[00:12:15]It's a perfect radiator in all directions, right? Equally balanced radiation, but shooting the RF energy in the directions that we don't necessarily need it. And as we work through from left to right on the slide, we can see that we select more directional antennas. Now, as a bit of an aside, I always think it's funny that we talk about omni versus directional antennas.

[00:12:37]Technically, all antennas have directionality. Right? So, it's it's little little interesting that we talk about that, but we still use use those terms. And as we get more focused in our directions, we move from bad to better to best, ultimately landing on a cone of silence style of design where we're directing all of the RF energy down in direction towards the clients or people walking along the sidewalk where we need the RF energy. Right? Now, a lot of people get stuck on this one concept that we're focusing and shooting the RF energy where we want it. The other huge benefit to these directional style antennas is not only do we get the gain in the downward direction, we also get the benefit in the upward direction. So, we're focusing on what direction we're listening to, which reduces our noise floor and in turn increases the quality of our Wi-Fi signal by increasing our SNR or signal-to-noise ratio. Right?

[00:13:37]Which is a way of measuring Wi-Fi quality. So, we get benefit in both directions. Now, at a high level, we have three types of antenna patterns that we generally describe for our antenna shapes. We have the omni style directional antennas, which are classic donuts or bagel-shaped, right? Depending if you you like more of a sweet dessert or more of a savory style snack. We have our patch antennas, which are great, generally they shoot RF energy in 180°.

[00:14:06]Or, you know, a little bit narrower.

[00:14:09]Great for shots down hallways or the cones of silence. Or we have our highly directional antennas, which are great for those outdoor point-to-point or point-to-multipoint type links, which are very focused, approaching laser-like directionality.

[00:14:25]Okay?

[00:14:25]With our antennas, we often have polar plots, right? That we can use to determine the direction of the antennas, right? And the way Wi-Fi antennas are marketed is you'll take the direction of maximum gain, and you'll subtract 3 dB from that. So, as you follow the shape or the outline of that antenna pattern, which is the red line, where that red line intersects with that minus 3 dB cutoff, that's where we'll delineate the angle for that antenna.

[00:14:56]Now, I would point out that I think we're a little bit cowboyish when it comes to Wi-Fi antennas. 3 dB is is not very substantial, right? So, although we would describe this antenna that you're looking at on the slide as a 60° beamwidth antenna, and it looks, according to the picture, that it's rolling off fairly sharp, it actually ends up being quite wide. So, if you were to pick this antenna to light up a section inside a stadium with an overhead design, it may radiate into the sections adjacent to you. So, instead of just focusing on one section, you may be providing, unknowingly, a quite strong signals to the sections around you, providing more clients associating to that radio, which could impact your capacity-based design. Whereas, if you look at cellular type designs, they're more 6 dB, 9 dB cutoff for their antennas, right? But their antennas often cost significantly more than what a Wi-Fi antenna comes could be priced at. Now, omnidirectional antennas, here's an example of a specific scenario here.

[00:16:03]The thing I like to think about is when you imagine the RF energy, and Matt was talking about EIRP earlier. EIRP is often what I like to describe is the energy leaving the antenna, right? So, it's the the sum of the conducted power and the antenna gain, it's the energy leaving out leaving the antenna, and I like to imagine that as a balloon filled with air. Right? So, if you imagine that balloon filled with air, that volume of the balloon represents that total energy radiating from that antenna.

[00:16:33]Antennas cannot create a bigger or smaller balloon. What antennas do is control the shape of that balloon. So, if you imagine squishing or squeezing that balloon in your hands to give it extra bulge in different directions, that's what our antennas do. So, when we look at high and low gain antennas, a low gain omnidirectional antenna gives us that classic donut or bagel shape that you see in the bottom. If we pick a higher gain antenna, we're not creating a bigger balloon, we're just squishing that balloon. So, it's like flattening our donut to make it more pancake-shaped. So, it squeezes out horizontally, but we compromise directions in the vertical direction.

[00:17:14]But the volume of that balloon remains the same because they're passive gain antennas.

[00:17:19]Okay? We also have other shapes, right?

[00:17:21]So, here's just kind of a zoom in of some more directional antennas, patch antennas, and you can see that the radiation propagates out in more of a 180° direction, right? We also can see inside Ekahau as you pick and select your antennas, we have the 3D model that you can rotate around, spin that to get more perspective on what's what's going on there.

[00:17:42]Yeah, exactly. So, if you're wondering how we're generating or showing you that these antenna patterns in 3D, and you want to see them yourselves, if you head over to Ekahau AI Pro online, and you pick an access point, when you look at the expanded capabilities here, and you hover your mouse over one of these examples, you'll see the antenna pattern pop up in 3D, and then you can visualize it before you place it to see is this going to be the right type of antenna choice for my design.

[00:18:05]And recently, there's been a lot of vendors actually that are bringing out access points that have integrated directionality to their access points, so you can get the benefit of a directional antenna without having to install an additional piece of hardware and mount it and point it in a certain direction. So, two examples here very quickly, we've got the Cisco 9176D1, which is an 8 dBi gain antenna that has a 70 by 70 beamwidth, and we've got the Mist AP47D, which is again an 8 dBi gain antenna with a 60 by 60° beam width. And then what we wanted to do is just kind of show you the difference between using >> [clears throat] >> a directional directional one of their integrated directional antenna APs versus a similar model with the omnidirectional one. So, we configured the transmit power here of 5 dBm for both. And because the D1 has higher passive gain, the EIRP here is 13, but on the omnidirectional option, it's only 10.35. And this is with them both on the ceiling pointing down. So, you can see by using a directional antenna, if you are in a situation where you need to control the cell sizes a bit more, maybe auditoriums, arenas, stadiums, etc., etc., then this could be a good option for you to control the cell sizes versus a omnidirectional, which you can see goes a a lot further.

[00:19:25]And this was the 9176D1 from Cisco versus 9176I.

[00:19:30]We then did the same comparison between the AP47D from HP Mist and the AP47.

[00:19:38]Very kind of like similar sort of propagation patterns and options here for going between the directional one and the omnidirectional one between between the two. So, when you're coming to your designs, you can maybe this will help you visualize sometime when you're going to take the approach for Omni or sometimes for directional. And a lot of the time you might be thinking, well, if I was going to be using a directional, I'm probably going to put it on the wall and shoot it from from the side, which you have sort of course you can do that. But if you do need to have a little bit more control of your cell sizes, you can you can put them on the ceiling as well. So, let's move on to the next section. So, requirements and environment Troy.

[00:20:16]Yeah, so one of the most important things you can do as part of your Wi-Fi design is go through the requirements gathering exercise, right? And this is actually where you should invest a lot of your time.

[00:20:28]There's often you know, a popular saying in in Wi-Fi where uh people often say it depends.

[00:20:35]Sometimes they attach the the trademark logo after that. This is one of the reasons I think Wi-Fi practitioners should maybe stay in their lane.

[00:20:43]Legally, the trademark doesn't apply to it depends. But where I'm going with all of this is that you want to ask so many questions during the requirement gathering process that you can answer those it depends questions, that you're not left in a state where you're saying, well, it depends on this or that. You should have clarified that during your requirements gathering questions, right?

[00:21:04]So, you're asking so many questions almost to the point of being annoying to the stakeholders. Start off by addressing the business requirements, right? What are the business stakeholders? What are their needs? I would go so far as the business should not be identifying which wireless technology should be used. Right? As as much of a fan as I am about Wi-Fi, that should be a technical requirement to decide, you know, if it's Wi-Fi or if you want to use LTE 5G, BLE, Zigbee, maybe ultra-wideband as solution. All of which, by the way, are technologies that you can design using AI Pro online, right? But that's a technical decision which wireless standard best meets those business requirements. Then you move into the technical requirement technical requirements where you're deciding which APs, which frequency bands do we want to use, which um areas are in scope, what are the limitations based on our regulatory domain for our maximum transmit power and the channels that we have available, right? And then we move into the RF requirements, right?

[00:22:06]Sometimes you're translating a business's requirement of we need the Wi-Fi to be good, right? How do you measure? How do you design for a target of good Wi-Fi? Right? We have to quantify that into specific KPIs that we can measure and then validate that our design delivered on those performance KPIs, right? So, that's a high-level overview of what the design process workflow would be.

[00:22:29]We also want to be cognizant of what materials are used in the site that we're designing for. So, various walls, attenuation objects. Here's an example of some typical values that you may see for many common wall types, right? But ideally, you could go on site, perform a survey at that location or maybe some spot checks to find out what that material attenuation is, right? And so, the idea there is signals coming from our access points, they'll hit a wall and will get signal loss due to reflections, absorptions, diffractions through that material. With the point being on the other side of that wall, the signal is much weaker and we use that as part of our predictive modeling.

[00:23:11]For sure, that is like such a key part of your predictive modeling. But also, another key thing for your predictive modeling is understanding where you can physically mount access points and antennas. You might have the perfect location on the map where you want to place the the green dot for the access point, but in reality, there may be some physical obstructions or problems that would stop you from actually being able to install in the location. So, going on site, understanding your environment from a materials perspective, from an attenuation loss like Troy said, then also being able to understand that, oh, I I can mount an access point here, but if I go 3 m over there, I'm going to be running into all of this kind of like HVAC and etc. etc. that I'm I may not be able to get a cable to or install my access point or antenna. So, that is really important. And now, just going to mention very quickly cuz this is survey data and analyzing survey data, but I've been interferer that that Troy and Dobias you see pop up very quickly in a second. We're going to cover this in the later decoded series in more depth. But the one thing that we wanted to just mention here quickly is that during the survey, they were able to uncover a type of a type of interference on 5 GHz on Wi-Fi in the 5 GHz frequency band that wasn't Wi-Fi, but was operating in the same space as the Wi-Fi access points here. And these devices, they could not be removed. So, what that would mean, if you had these types of devices in your environment, when it came to your design and planning, you would need to exclude these channels that were affected by the interference from your plan so you can then design around it.

[00:24:42]So, just something to to be aware of.

[00:24:44]And then now, let's quickly discuss the tools that we're going to be showing today, Troy.

[00:24:50]Yeah, so the flagship product from Ekahau is the Ekahau AI Pro online tool, which we can analyze and perform our RF designs, right? So, we'll be jumping into some live demos momentarily. We talked about measuring signals and walls, right? If you're able to go to an existing site and it it just needs some Wi-Fi access points deployed, could be the ones you're troubleshooting or the ones that you're planning to refresh or upgrade, you can walk around, perform a survey, and the software will automatically learn the attenuation properties of those materials on site that you can take and use as part of your design, which eliminates the need for you to spend those hours and hours of drawing walls for you, right? Or you can take a floor plan and AI will automatically recognize the walls for you and build the walls for you. So, you have two different options of how you approach a modeling attenuation in your products or in projects.

[00:25:46]Right? Now, one of the questions that come up is how should a Wi-Fi practitioner design the network? What's what kind of target or goal should be used as part of this process, right? To answer that question, how do we know when we've come up with the best design? I would argue that the best design is the one that uses the least number of access points while still meeting all of the design requirements, right? So, it's it's a very simple saying, but the very key caveat there is you meet all of the design requirements that you would have invested a lot of time up front asking those questions about the requirements for your design process.

[00:26:25]Yeah, and you can you can tell straight away, by the way, who who made this this graphic or this slide is because the amount is in is in pounds.

[00:26:33]But I really wanted to try and like quantify in a way of like making like a very small mistake in a in a Wi-Fi design, how how costly that mistake could actually end up being. So, for example here, if you've got let's say that you've done a design that's going to take around 100 access points and you have a 5% error, either plus or minus five access points, the cost of being wrong by 5% or five access points is never just the cost of the hardware of the access point. You've got the cost the physical cost of the AP hardware, you've got the cost of the licensing for the access points, the cabling and the materials to run to the location of the access points. You've got to pay an installation team typically the labor to go and do this. You then need to think about the cost of the switching, the impact on PoE and and the energy you're going to be using. Does that then push you outside of your PoE budget and you need to buy additional switches? So, this could being wrong by 5% could cost you a significant amount of investment to retrospectively go back, rework your design, rework the deployment, run new cable, delay the project. Also, it doesn't just like cost a lot of money from a monetary value, but also from a reputation perspective when you've got to retrospectively go in and fix problems that you could have got right first time. That's why it's so important to have the right tools and also have the right knowledge to know how to use the tools and actually you'll end up saving money. And this feels like a good time to mention the ECSE design course.

[00:27:55]This is a course that we have updated the content for. We update all of our course materials regularly, but we have a nice big fresh refresh of the the content of the ECSE design class. We spend four days talking about different types of designs, how to use the tools, how to apply them, how to use it with different types of verticals and environments. So, if you're not just designing for offices, it could be hospitals, it could be schools, it could be warehouses, you name it, we cover it.

[00:28:21]I would highly recommend you check it out.

[00:28:24]Now, have you ever have you ever heard someone say that you know, a little rule of thumb about designs, do not place APs in hallways, right? That's one of the things that we often hear about Wi-Fi and people critique those style designs.

[00:28:38]So, let's let's drill into this a little bit and have a conversation around that, right?

[00:28:42]So, here we have an example of design.

[00:28:45]This particular design leverages 31 access points and you can see them all placed along the hallways. Now, there are a couple of APs that looks like they may be in the room, but really that's kind of the the foyer where you stand and wait for your elevator. So, all these APs in this example placed in hallways. And if you just look at the heat map, it suggests that everything is green. And often people like to say green is good, but is will that really lead to good Wi-Fi performance?

[00:29:15]Yeah, so when you when you when you really think about it is that why not to put APs just in hallways is because actually the previous heat map looked like it would be okay, but in reality, when you're designing for hotels or student accommodation like this, when you've got the bathrooms that are as you first walk in, these can sometimes be covered with tiles, you can have pipes in here. So, this could be a more realistic reflective heat map that would be more likely when you just put access points in the corridors or hallways. And the other thing is if you just put APs in the hallways, the likelihood is that they're all going to be able to hear each other and we've only got a finite amount of spectrum that we can use and this might actually lead to having a lot of channel interference of APs on your own network.

[00:30:00]And this does So this doesn't necessarily compile to what we would we would refer to refer to as a as a good design. And then you might have people that take the approach to put APs in every single room and now we just jump from 31 access points to 78 access points. And now this This might be the right design to meet the requirements, especially if you're using hospitality access points that have those additional LAN ports on the bottom of the access points that you're trying to leverage.

[00:30:24]It could come down to the physical materials that you have in your environment why you go with a option like this. You may end up going for an option where you've gone with APs in every other room and then it brings it down to 42 access points. And then recently we were able to see a design that a partner took of a hybrid approach of a mixture of APs in the room plus some APs in the hallways.

[00:30:46]And that was actually very interesting.

[00:30:48]And the reason why we found that quite interesting because it was a bit of a hybrid approach maybe you don't necessarily come across all too often. And why that was quite interesting and actually it did work very well is because when you think about how clients are going to behave in roaming between different going from the hotel room out into the hallways to the lift foyer and then traversing between different floors and stuff like that.

[00:31:10]The whole purpose of the Wi-Fi is mobile devices so that we can stay connected as we move around these environments. So it's good that the access points could be able to hear each other and build their neighbor reports to inform these roaming decisions. So that was a a very interesting indeed.

[00:31:25]Now a lot of classical designs have only focused on providing coverage whether that's primary, secondary or even tertiary for your real-time location based designs. But in today's designs not only do we need coverage, we need signal just for Wi-Fi to work, but we also need to make sure we're considering and accounting for capacity.

[00:31:45]Right?

[00:31:46]Looking at how many devices will be used by each person, right? Then it can depend on different scenarios or venues.

[00:31:52]You know, in a warehouse every forklift may only have one barcode scanner. Every warehouse operator has one barcode scanner. But if you think about university campus environments, students showing up into lecture halls, they may have in their backpacks their you know, their laptop, tablet, mobile phone, their watch, a gaming console in case they get bored during the professor's lecture. And actually we find that the more boring the lecture, the higher the Wi-Fi utilization during that class, right? Which is kind of an interesting correlation that's been proven time time and time again, right? So understanding those capacity capacity ratios is is an important [clears throat] very important requirement for today's capacity based designs.

[00:32:35]So so hopefully not too many people are on their phones or or laptops being distracted during this lecture today, eh?

[00:32:42]Well, we we did kind of speed date through these slides a bit today because we really wanted to we really wanted to spend the bulk of the the webinar today actually just doing live demos in AirPro line and talking about different designs and concepts. And we're going to jump into the first design, but let me just launch this poll question because we're going to let you Yeah, we've got a poll question. We're going to let you guys and girls decide which AP manufacturer you would like us to use for the first design and then also for the next design that Troy is going to be doing in a in a warehouse, you're going to be able to pick between the vendor of choice that you would like us to use as well.

[00:33:18]It's going to be in I can see people in the chat saying A OP or Cisco or other ones, but please use the the poll question. We'll you should have it popped up on your on your on your uh on your screen now.

[00:33:34]Only counts if it's part of the poll.

[00:33:36]Yeah, it's a It's very close right now, so get your votes in.

[00:33:39]Remember. Choose wisely. Choose wisely.

[00:33:43]Okay.

[00:33:45]Okay. We get the reference there, Stu.

[00:33:48]>> [laughter] >> All right, I'm going to there's a there is a clear winner. So let me just end the poll and uh share the results. So a lot of you decided that you would like us to use Cisco for this one. So okay, I'm going to use this the Cisco APs. And for the first demo we're going to be looking at a large office with a auditorium. So let's take a look at what we have here. So we've got a a large office environment and we have also got this conference area. And let me just quickly show you this in in 3D so we can understand the space a bit better. So the office area, this is all at the kind of standard 2 and 1/2 m high typical office usage. We've got a a canteen over here in in this kind of like top right-hand section, but then what I've done is I've built out the auditorium to have this tiered seating that goes up to a certain height and a think of this like as a a lecture hall.

[00:34:40]So we're going to design we're going to design the Wi-Fi network and we're going to have in mind designing for coverage, but not only coverage, but also capacity. So inside of the areas we have defined our coverage requirements, but also defined capacity for the entire office and then also specifically in the conference area auditorium as well. So how do I design using those Cisco access points? Well, first of all I'm going to go to my device tool and I'm not going to have any assisted planning today.

[00:35:11]We're just going to do it all manually ourselves and then talk through the concepts. So I'm now going to pick the 9176i.

[00:35:20]I'm going to go with the i first of all.

[00:35:22]And then now I'm going to click on this additional properties and remember earlier myself and Troy was telling you how do you see the antenna pattern in 3D and then move things around. So I just highlight over here and then I can move things around. Now you can see that we've got our transmit power currently at eight for 2.4 GHz which gives us a 14 dBM EIRP. On 5 GHz it's set to 14 with a 19.35 EIRP and on 6 GHz it's set to 14 as well with a just under 20 dBs EIRP. So what I can do now, if I'm happy with this, I could just place the access point, but I think I want to tune it down so that my total EIRP is closer to 14 dB EIRP. So I'm just going to change this to be about nine on 5 GHz and then also maybe I'll do it around 10 on 6 GHz. So there's a slight difference there.

[00:36:18]And now what what I do when I'm typically doing a design for an environment, I quite usually like to start going from left left to right and work my way around the kind of like in a clockwise format. So what I can do here when I'm looking at at this area, I'm thinking where like where are the users going to be using in the Wi-Fi and then where are they going to be potentially traversing through the environment. So I can place my access point first of all and then now you can see the signal strength coming from the access point.

[00:36:47]Um so what I'm going to do now is actually I don't just want to have one AP in the middle here. So what I can do is I can place an access point in the room over here and I would look at this and I would think where else would I want to place the access point. So I personally when if I was doing this design, I probably would do something like this for this area alone and then I would look at it from this kind of like perspective and think okay, am I covered nicely in this area? Am I ready to move on to the next next area? At the moment I'm just looking at primary signal strength, but perhaps maybe I want to look at primary and then before I move on, have I met my secondary coverage requirements in this area? Now it's all green. That looks good. I'm happy to move on to the next area. So I'm going to go back to my my primary coverage.

[00:37:34]Zoom in a bit now. We've got this busy canteen area and also this kitchen space as well. So what I want to do is I think I feel like I want to have like at least a few access points around here because this is going to be a heavy utilized area for Wi-Fi I would say. So I would place an access point here and then I would I'm also thinking about like how are people going to come like come from this side of the office to this area as well like how utilized is that going to be. So I would place my access point there. Also like if I'm if I want I can then think about maybe putting I would have I would say at least two or three access points for this area for now.

[00:38:15]And then I would wonder like do I need to have an AP inside of the kitchen or would having one just kind of like around in this foyer area be enough. And also we've got this section here where there are going to be some seating as well as over here on this side too. So I think for now maybe I'll just go for one access point around here for this section and maybe that's okay for now and then I'll come back to it a little bit later on. So I'm going to leave this section for now and work my way around this side and then come back. So if I zoom in a little bit here, I'm looking at the the spaces that we've got. I can see that there are some offices and there will be some users over here. So if I was to place an access point now, I think the place that I would be looking to put an AP would be somewhere over here to make sure that this office gets good coverage as well.

[00:39:03]And then I will zoom out a little bit and look at the rest of these banks of desks down here in this area.

[00:39:10]Then I would place my access point. So I probably one over here.

[00:39:14]Maybe I'm going to do something like something like this and then now from a coverage perspective, this looks pretty pretty good. So I'm quite happy with with this area for now, but then maybe I've got this big kind of like training center room. This is the reception area.

[00:39:30]I definitely want to have at least one access point over here. I want to have an AP in this area for where people will be coming to sign in for the reception.

[00:39:39]They're going to be hanging around waiting to get signed in.

[00:39:43]Then this kind of like middle section as well, for sure we're going to want to have at least one access point over here.

[00:39:50]And I'm going to leave this auditorium for a little while now and come back to it in in a few moments.

[00:39:57]Now if I come over to this side, this section, again we've got quite a big bank of desks here and again what looks like possibly a training area. So I would add a few access points over here.

[00:40:08]And then at least one access point in there. So I didn't check at any point though like when I did this area and these areas my secondary coverage or if it'd be meeting the capacity requirements that I had set. So what I could do is I can change here to secondary signal strength.

[00:40:26]Looking all right in most places now just apart from over here we may need to have another access point, but how about from a capacity perspective, how's how's that looking? Well, let me change to the capacity view now.

[00:40:38]If I zoom in you can see a 24 number over a another this 24 number over a slash 30. This is because we've defined in our capacity requirements that we don't want to have any more than 30 devices per radio. So this is actually calculating to show that in this area it's going to have 24 devices within our requirements, but if I scroll down here you can see if just having these two access points for this section, it would potentially over subscribe our capacity requirements for this section. Again like over here as well doesn't seem like it's going to be meeting our requirements. So it's totally okay if you start your design and then you end up coming back to it to tweak some things because you haven't quite met your requirements. So what you could do is potentially move this access point over here. I'm going to bring this one over there and then I'm going to add another one back into to this zone over here.

[00:41:32]And then we've got you know quite a few quite a few client devices trying to associate around these areas because of the auditorium. So for now I'd just add one more into here.

[00:41:46]And then the the reason why we're seeing some bleed out into that is because of the the auditorium. So let's let's just come back to the signal strength view for a few moments time because I really want to discuss how we can potentially use a different option for the auditorium. So the auditorium height at the moment goes up to somewhere around I want to say I figured it to be about 5 m.

[00:42:12]No, 3 and 1/2 m.

[00:42:15]So we can use the the directional antenna AP options for the order sort of conference area. So instead of using the 9176i, I'm going to change to the D1. And now in the additional properties I do want it to be on the ceiling still, but I want it to be a higher height. So I want it to be at let's say 7 m high. So I'm going to change that to be 7 m. And Remember these have a fairly high passive gain with the directionality of the antenna. So I'm actually going to tune the transmit power down like super low and you can still see the EIRP is fairly high there.

[00:42:53]So even with a transmit power of two the EIRP is going to be 10.

[00:42:57]So I'm going to just do that. And then I'm going to place one of the access points here and let me just select just this access point. And now the reason why we want to go with a directional antenna option here is because you can see that this is going to cover that this nice this section of seats like nicely, but also not everywhere like super super strong. If I used a omnidirectional access point, so if I just um move that there for a second and then I swap out to be a 9176i.

[00:43:33]I just you can see now how much the the difference in the coverage that this one will how much further that this will cover compared to the directional and let me just swap back to that one.

[00:43:48]Again.

[00:43:50]And the reason for the going with the directional option here is because when a client device walks in to the auditorium, if we've got let's say if I move this one back over here, like as the as the client device walks in, as it walks in it's going to get a very good signal from this access point and there is a chance that even if you go and sit all the way over here, if this was an omnidirectional antenna, you would have such a good signal strength connection from this access point that the device would never roam. So from a planning of a capacity perspective, it's better to go with directional in terms where you can control the shape of the RF to have a better chance of spreading the load out of your devices in in the particular area. So let me just come back to the device tool, the D1. Let me check the properties are all kind of how I would like it. And for somewhere like this I would probably like a four like AP design approach to design for this area.

[00:44:49]And then again now obviously we're just looking at coverage for for the moment. Let's go back to the capacity view now and see that everywhere is looking pretty okay, but this section right here has got a little bit gray. So we could probably or possibly do with one or two more access points to meet the requirements for what we have planned so far.

[00:45:13]And yeah, so I'm going to just add in a couple of extra APs now. I'm going to go to the 9176i.

[00:45:20]Don't want them to be at 7.4 now.

[00:45:25]Let me just put one over here.

[00:45:29]And then another one probably I would move this up a bit.

[00:45:34]Have one here.

[00:45:37]And then finally I would maybe have one extra one.

[00:45:41]Something something along these lines.

[00:45:49]Any more?

[00:45:52]I think about it.

[00:45:55]And now we come up with a design that meets not only our coverage requirements, but also the capacity requirements for our areas based on what we have defined. So um I just come back to the signal strength view.

[00:46:14]And we can look at it from like a holistic point of view now and then we can obviously see things in 3D as well.

[00:46:19]So see that we set these at at different heights as a couple of options there. Okay, cool. I'm going to stop sharing now so I can give Troy some time to go through his design as well. And we're going to let you pick which AP vendor to design for. So the the choice now of which vendor you would like Troy to design for will be between Aruba and Extreme.

[00:46:46]Okay.

[00:46:48]Uh there seems to be quite a clear clear winner so far. Just give it a few few more seconds.

[00:46:55]Um Troy you can go ahead and share your screen if you would like. Um so you can get yours up.

[00:47:03]And I will uh end the poll.

[00:47:08]Okay, and let me share the results. So um yeah, 79% of you decided that you would like Troy to design using HP Aruba access points. So over to you Troy.

[00:47:21]All right.

[00:47:22]HP Aruba, okay. Let's uh >> [clears throat] >> let's make that work, right?

[00:47:27]Uh so the scenario we have here and just confirm you can see my screen, correct Matt? Yep. Yep, right. So we have a a warehouse design, right? This warehouse to give you some context, it's made up of two different floors.

[00:47:39]Uh similar to what Matt did, if we just flip to the 3D view it'll give us some context of this.

[00:47:45]Right? Uh so in this particular warehouse the the two floors, it's a large open area with some smaller shelving drawn in blue for the attenuation objects. So these are relatively short racks. Then we have some taller racks shown in orange.

[00:48:01]There is a mezzanine level.

[00:48:03]Right? But we can see here on the other side of the the floor. The mezzanine just covers this one side or one end of the warehouse. So it's a second floor with some racks above it. Right?

[00:48:14]Uh but there is some racks underneath on the main floor.

[00:48:18]Smaller [clears throat] racks themselves. So if I come out of the 3D view, I can also click on my building tab. And by looking at the building tab here by clicking that on the left hand side, it shows me some characteristics of this building that I've created with the multiple floors and I could easily adjust if I wanted to the height of those floors or the thickness and the attenuation of those floors. So for context for our model that we have here the ground floor from the floor to the height of that mezzanine level is 5 m. Right? But the height from the ground to the very roof of the warehouse is 8 m high. Right? So that's how we we have the complete warehouse itself. But again we could change and modify things if we needed to for our warehouse design.

[00:49:05]I can look at the ground floor itself and I can see all the attenuation objects that have been drawn and created for part of our model. And if I hover over and click the eyeball, I can click on the mezzanine level and I can see the racks themselves that have been drawn there. And I've already created a hole in the floor as part of this mezzanine level to remove that floor so it's an open section to what's down below.

[00:49:28]Right? So now let's jump into a part of our design. Right? And the polls reflected that we want to design with HP Aruba.

[00:49:36]So let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to start by clicking my device tool icon and I'm designed for Wi-Fi technology.

[00:49:43]We're going to do a Wi-Fi focused design, but as we mentioned earlier, uh we could go down the path of designing for Bluetooth or 4G 5G cellular technologies as well as IoT technologies like Zigbee and ultra-wideband, but we'll stick to Wi-Fi.

[00:49:58]Right? Uh in my vendor choice, I'm going to type in Aruba and select Aruba from the field and then I get a drop-down list of a bunch of Aruba access points that I could use as part of my design.

[00:50:09]So, I'm just going to scroll through this list.

[00:50:12]And here, I may decide uh to pick uh perhaps um I'll go with the Aruba uh AP 679 here, right? And I have a few different options uh that I could use.

[00:50:25]Uh I could do some software selection and change between narrow and wideband or wide antenna patterns. Uh pick uh some different scopes there. Uh I could also pick uh different access points. If I go with uh 665, right? So, that could be a choice there if I wanted to leverage some integrated antennas. Right? Um if we wanted to try design for Wi-Fi Wi-Fi 7 capabilities, we could grab the uh 735 here and I may choose that if I just want to quickly drop some access points into the office area.

[00:51:01]Right? So, maybe I'll choose to put a few access points into my office area there.

[00:51:07]All right. So, that's relatively easy covering the office space. Uh but if you want to play around with the more uh complex warehouse environment, right? We can pick uh a different antenna pattern, different AP model. Uh so, let's >> [snorts] >> uh use maybe the uh 7 45. We could try that.

[00:51:26]Right?

[00:51:26]With the 745, uh we grab that AP model and then maybe want to look at changing some of the antenna types for this particular uh access point. Uh do do do do do do do do do do do do do do Actually, let's grab a different AP here.

[00:51:45]Uh just go with the this directional the 765 here. Right?

[00:51:50]Uh and if I change the the properties, right? Before I put this access point in, I just want to modify some of the the mounting and the height parameters of this access point.

[00:52:00]Right? Uh so, here because I know that my warehouse ceiling is 8 m high, I'm going to mount these APs almost directly on the ceilings, right? So, they'll hang just on the truss below the ceiling, uh which would be about half a meter below the ceiling itself. So, I'm going to set my ceiling height to be 7.5 m, right? Uh I also have the option of changing these APs. It could be ceiling mounted, which is what I want in this case. Uh some APs will default to wall mounting, so I may need to change that if needed. And if you happen to design maybe inside a data center or something like that, uh perhaps or in a stadium where you had under-seat access points, maybe you want to pick a floor-mounted access points in that case to mount it uh underneath the floor. But we're as I mentioned, we're going to stick with ceiling mounted, right? So, once I have those parameters set, I can go ahead and add one of my access points uh mounted up on the ceiling, right? And with this AP, right? If we zoom into this guy here, right? I can see that it's giving uh some pretty good coverage. I also have the ability to rotate it uh by clicking on a little uh circle that's just uh outside my access point. And if I click on that circle, I can change the uh rotation of my access point. Right? So, here I have my little circle and as I spin this around, I'm changing the rotation or the focus of that AP.

[00:53:22]Right? So, if we zoom out here a little bit, I can keep adding access points into my warehouse, right? By clicking on my device icon, uh drop a few more APs in.

[00:53:35]Right?

[00:53:36]Uh and I as Matt demonstrated earlier, I'm following the manual process for doing this. If I wanted a little bit of guidance, I could turn on assisted planning and it'll enable reactive uh and dynamic planning for me. As I add access points manually, it'll recalculate the suggestions of where it thinks I can add access points, right?

[00:53:57]So, it'll help me kind of guide me along the process or maybe I want to do my own design just keep adding access points manually.

[00:54:05]Right? Uh now, if I drop access points in, I can uh reposition and move them, right?

[00:54:11]Making sure that I'm filling in coverage uh where I think it's necessary. By clicking on individual access points, you see the coverage provided by that one or if you click multiple APs, you can focus on certain access points that you've added into your design. Um I could also select these access points and because I'm using a specific model with a specific antenna uh combination, I may want to give these APs a certain color, right? So, that it's easy to distinguish these APs from another AP model and antenna combination, right?

[00:54:44]So, let's mark these ones uh blue as an example, right? Then I had those office APs that I added earlier. Let's just uh give them a color as well so I can easily differentiate them. And uh just for historical reasons, we'll color uh them uh HP Aruba orange there, right?

[00:55:01]So, we have uh some orange there and some blue access points that we've added and I can keep adding access points to my design, right? Uh making sure that I'm providing good coverage.

[00:55:15]Right? For everywhere that uh I need to add access points. And actually, for these guys here, let's try oops.

[00:55:23]All right. So, I've added a few APs and if we just click on this one access point, uh I can see the coverage pattern from that one AP. So, let's try a little modification here. If I go back uh clicking on my access point, I can also adjust the tilt of this AP, right? So, by adjusting its tilt, right? Uh we can uh change the the focus and I can see uh right now I'm tilting it so that it's shooting the bulk of the energy up and out of the the warehouse aisles. So, if we tilt it the other direction, we can now see that it's shooting along the length of the warehouse aisles, right?

[00:55:57]So, I can find uh the ideal target, right? And maybe I just want to get it set up so that it's shooting uh just to get to the edge of that warehouse aisle, right? So, it's shooting all the way down there, but I may want to add a dedicated AP towards the bottom to fill in that gap, but have a little bit of overlap and it's giving me about an 18° tilt. Just to make this easier for the humans, maybe I'll manually set it to be 20 instead of using the slider.

[00:56:23]So, I can do that. And then in the opposite direction for this access point, right? I'll go in here and edit it. And for this guy here, I'll set it to point 20° in the opposite direction so that it's shooting up. Now, I have two access points on both ends of that warehouse aisle, that warehouse rack shooting down to provide redundant coverage. So, now if it gets uh blocked uh one path or one coverage pattern from one AP when the forklift drives or the forklift stops and raises itself to pick inventory off those shelves, I'm not blocking the RF signal that I have uh a backup coverage, a backup signal coming from another direction in case there were two forklifts driving in and out of these warehouse racks. All right. This is where you want to ask questions, you know, how busy, how active is the warehouse? Uh how many forklifts would be driving around? Would you have situations where there were multiple forklifts uh pulling or adding inventory out of the warehouse racks at the same time.

[00:57:21]So, now that I I figure I have a good pattern there, I could actually go ahead and maybe delete some of these access points, right? And so, I could take this one AP, we'll center it a little bit more. I could then copy this access point. So, I do a control C uh control V, right? And copy this access point.

[00:57:39]Right? And then I can just move that copied AP, right? And add it to my warehouse aisles giving me the angle that I want uh shooting down these warehouse aisles.

[00:57:48]And I could do the same thing right? For these APs down at the bottom that's shooting up. And I can just copy them, drag them, and move them. Now, I want to be mindful as I add my access points to think about where my cable runs are going. Where do I have easy uh access to my switches? Where are they installed? Are you know, do I have switches up on the ceiling, which are a little bit harder to service? Or do I have uh racks that are mounted to pillars or columns? Uh and then be mindful that I'm adhering to my 100-m distance limitation for my Ethernet runs from my uh switches uh up to the ceiling then down to my access points. So, I want to also be mindful not only picking good RF positions for my access points, but finding economical positions to place my APs where it's convenient and easily accessible uh to run the cables and provide power for those access points. Right? And to be mindful of time, uh I could just keep following this process adding additional access points uh to my areas here. Uh for these uh other warehouse racks that are shown in more of a brown color, those are the warehouse racks that are actually below the mezzanine level, right? So, if I was to add an access points there, uh I may pick a different AP model, right? And uh maybe adjust the height for it. So, if I was to add an access points uh in here instead of picking one uh that was mounted at 7.5 m, I could come in here, adjust this access point, change it from 7.5, and because the height of that mezzanine level is about 5 m, I'll set my AP height to be about 4.9 m, right? So, just below the floor of that mezzanine level and I'll drop this access point in here and maybe tuck it uh in these warehouse aisles and do uh something like this.

[00:59:35]Right? And then I can keep adding access points now with that set heights. Let's go back to this guy here. I'll copy him in a few more times.

[00:59:45]Right? And move him down here.

[00:59:48]Right? And maybe we'll add another one there. And if I click off those APs, I can see that maybe I want to take a staggered approach, right? Which may fill in enough coverage or if I was shooting for secondary coverage for some of these access points, I'd have to look at augmenting the number of APs in that warehouse design, right? So it really depends what my targets are for primary and what my secondary threshold is. If I'm matching primary and secondary both at neg 67 or maybe I I want to provide some redundant coverage. I don't need it to be super fast, but I can reduce my AP counts by having my secondary coverage set at a threshold like neg 75 or something like that. So primary neg 67, secondary at neg 75, which reduces my overall AP count, but does provide me some redundancy for roaming and some roaming overlapping coverage and redundancy in case one of the APs fails or something happens to it down the road. So that's an example of how we could go through designing Wi-Fi coverage for a warehouse.

[01:00:54]Amazing. Thank you, Troy. I'm going to steal the Um very quickly, someone asked in the chat, um was this project designed in the desktop version and then imported with all of the walls into AR Pro online? No, this was we we made this in the online version, so all of the walls and stuff that we've defined. And then someone asked how did we define the auditorium like the stair the seating like going up as we did. So we have a feature in Ekahau AR Pro online called elevated surfaces. So I I basically drew an elevated surface for each one of the auditorium seats and you can define the increment and the thickness etc. etc. Another question was how many devices we have for the total design that met the coverage coverage and capacity requirements for this project. It was 27, so 27 total network devices. So we can see this project here very quickly.

[01:01:50]I'm going to do one one one very one very quick demo for you before we wrap up the webinar. We will answer some of the questions in the Q&A. I know we've run over a little bit here, but we always want to try and give you as much content as we possibly can. So another approach that you might want to take or try out with Ekahau AR Pro online is if you have got survey data, then this can be of a old survey that you've done quite a however many years ago. Like this was a survey that we did quite a while ago now.

[01:02:20]And this is just pure measured survey data opened in the edit mode in AR Pro online. So we're in this measured environment and there's no walls, there's no obstacles drawn. So you go into 3D, you don't see anything in 3D.

[01:02:32]We just see the the APs on the map.

[01:02:35]We see just 2.4 and 5 GHz coverage.

[01:02:37]There's five Cisco Meraki access points that were deployed here. And the reason why I wanted to just quickly show you this is because you can take measured survey data to quickly come up with a new design or a redesign of your environment. So before if I wanted to simulate moving this access point from this location, perhaps I wanted to move it into the boardroom. Before I would have to draw every single wall, every single obstacle, set the right attenuation before I could simulate any changes. Whereas now I can just grab the access point and move it to a new location and the heat map will update based on that measured survey data. So we create this like AI ML engine of your environment. We know how RF propagates and behaves. So you can plan for quick changes like moving access points, adding access points, things like that.

[01:03:21]But for me, my favorite use case for this is actually simulating a network upgrade. So let's say you've got a legacy 2.4 and 5 GHz only environment and you want to see can I upgrade to a 6 GHz Wi-Fi 7 environment with keeping some of my existing AP locations cuz we know how expensive running cabling is.

[01:03:38]But what I can do now very quickly is I've just selected these access points on the left-hand side. Let me just turn on the labels.

[01:03:47]Because what I'm going to do now is I'm going to change this to be a Cisco Wi-Fi 7 version. So I'll upgrade to Wi-Fi 7. And as soon as I click on this, you notice that all of the access points changed. We now see additional options here and I can now even see the 6 GHz frequency band. So I can see if I wanted to just keep these AP locations, potentially I could meet my coverage requirements.

[01:04:11]But if I wanted to like what I can do is I can copy and paste and I can add in another access point. I could move this into here. I could relocate that over there. I could bring this one down here.

[01:04:21]Maybe I want to come up with a bit of a tweak to the design. So you can very quickly, very easily simulate network changes and upgrades. And the other thing I love about this is we can actually use Wi-Fi data collected on 2.4 and 5 GHz to simulate for 6 GHz, but not just other Wi-Fi frequency bands, but because these APs they have Bluetooth and ultra-wideband radios, you can now see what the ultra-wideband performance would look like from these access points and radios as well from measured survey data, which I think is super super cool. So that was a very quick demo of that. We wanted to just leave you with a few a few best practices. So Troy, I'll let you hit the audience with that.

[01:05:04]Yeah, to summarize this, everything that we've talked about, the whole process starts with defining the requirements. Right? You need to do a very thorough question and answer exercise identifying all the business, technical and RF requirements that you need to put together your design so that you can deliver and meet on all the design requirements, that you have a target to aim for as part of your design. And then very importantly, when you go to validate your implementation, you can prove that you delivered on that design scenario, right? Which allows you to sign off on the project or prove that you met the requirements, you know, issue that invoice, get that promotion, whatever you're going after.

[01:05:46]You need to understand your environment, right? The input variables for your design require you to understand the attenuation of the walls, the materials.

[01:05:57]Right?

[01:05:58]Where you can mount access points, what the aesthetics requirements are. Right?

[01:06:02]You need to understand what's going on in your environment, your neighborhood.

[01:06:06]Right? What type of interferers might be there? There could be sensors, LED lights, video cameras that are transmitting on the same frequency bands you want to use for Wi-Fi. You may need to avoid those channels as part of your channel assignment. So which channels do you need to exclude as part of your channel pool?

[01:06:24]Make sure you pick the right antennas so that you're covering what you want and not shooting RF energy where it's unnecessary. In the warehouse design, we're mounting access points high up on the ceiling. We want to shoot a cone of coverage down towards the ground. We don't care what the Wi-Fi is like up at the ceiling 8 m up in the air. We want good Wi-Fi signal down on the ground where the workers are walking around with barcode scanners or driving around with forklifts.

[01:06:51]And then lastly, you want to make sure that your design focuses on squeezing every bit of performance out of the network you're deploying, right? Get the value of the access points you're deploying. Use them for their full capabilities, right? And that means using the right combination of channels, channel widths, transmit powers, enabling those extra amendments so you get good clean fast roaming between your access points using things like the R, the K and the V amendments. Making sure your network's designed securely, right?

[01:07:25]That you're properly authenticating devices and encrypting traffic across that air gap and be mindful of how you configure and the number of SSIDs that you're putting in production to reduce the the impact of the airtime consumption from beacons sent across the airwaves and making it simple for users to figure out which SSID they need to connect to as they bring their devices into your environment.

[01:07:51]Thanks, Troy. And if you think about upgrading an environment to Wi-Fi 7 too and you'd like a bit of a guide or a helping hand with that, we have a ultimate upgrade guide including Wi-Fi 7, so you can just scan the QR code or you can head over to the Ekahau website and you'll be able to find that.

[01:08:06]It's got lots of great unique like tips and things to consider especially in upgrading like security, PoE budgeting for your switches. So not just from a Wi-Fi perspective, but other things you need to consider as well. So go ahead and and download that if you think it's going to be useful for you.

[01:08:23]And a big thank you from myself and Troy Stu and Dale for all of you for joining us on the Ekahau webinar today for our first of our five-part Wi-Fi decoded series where we covered design.

[01:08:36]We have gone over by a few minutes, but Stu Dale, I don't know if you had a question or two you wanted us to quickly answer from the Q&A. We try and answer chat and Q&A stuff as much as we can live. It's great to be able to interact with so many of you on the Ekahau webinar. So we'll try and maybe just do one or two quickly and then we can finish the webinar for today. Yeah, I'll just go quickly here as the top of the list.

[01:09:00]This is something that I probably wondered myself, but Hyten says, you know, in high density areas, why is it not the webinar as we talk about tertiary signal strength?

[01:09:10]Um maybe I'll put that out there.

[01:09:12]Yeah, tertiary for Yeah, Troy, go ahead.

[01:09:15]Yeah, generally tertiary comes into play when you're looking at location tracking, right? So a simple way of thinking about that is you can triangulate where the client devices are and you need that extra coverage. The business impact of that is that roughly triples the number of access points that you'd need, uh which ties back into the business need. If it's a business requirement, they'll find a way to fund tripling the number of access points. If it's not really a business requirement, that sticker shock will then dial them back for the number of access points. But, uh not every design needs uh location tracking capabilities, but that's when tertiary comes into play. So, it's not often that we talk about it, but if that's a requirement, that's where it would come into play. All right, thank you.

[01:09:58]Theo?

[01:09:59]Hey Matt, you actually addressed already live on one of the questions that I did have marked. It was around, you know, how do you account for that uh seating in that auditorium or stadium or theater type of environment. So, Okay. Awesome. All right. Well, uh seems that we answered as many things as we could today and the um the chat was flowing. We love seeing all of you uh joining us on the Ekahau webinar series.

[01:10:20]Thank you so much for again attending today. Uh we have another one coming up for you in in a few weeks time, and then maybe next month I'm going to see some of you uh in person at Wi-Fi Design Day in London, which we are very excited for as well. So, a huge thank you from everyone here at the Ekahau team. Hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, whether it's in the early morning, the afternoon, or the evening. Uh hopefully you have a great rest of your day and weekend, and we'll look forward to seeing you on the next Ekahau webinar.

[01:10:50]Have a great day, everyone.

[01:10:52]Thanks, everyone. See you later.