Wireless that works: ten lessons from a hundred deployments

The wireless network is the part of IT that everyone touches and almost nobody designs deliberately. Here is what a hundred deployments have taught us.

1. Survey first, every time. Even in spaces you have been in before. Furniture moves, walls get added, equipment changes.
2. Channel planning is half the battle. Auto-channel features are better than nothing but worse than thoughtful planning.
3. Five GHz is the room. 2.4 GHz is the building. Plan accordingly.
4. Coverage is not the goal. Capacity is. A signal-strength heatmap is necessary but not sufficient.
5. Power matters more than placement, sometimes. A perfectly placed AP at full power often makes things worse.
6. Cabling is the deployment, not an afterthought. Pulling cable to all the right ceiling locations takes longer than mounting the APs.
7. Guest networks always need to be isolated. Always.
8. Roaming is a feature you have to design for. Tablets and phones do not roam well by default.
9. Document the SSIDs, the VLAN mapping, and the radio plan. The next person needs to know.
10. Validate from the client side. An AP can show 100 percent healthy while a phone in the corner sees 30 percent.