Our client’s prestigious London location comprising ground floor retail/event space, five floors of office accommodation and an outdoor roof terrace needed good wireless coverage to support a wireless-first flexible working culture. They also needed an easy way to onboard visitors, and to segregate staff and guest traffic.
Our approach to this type of project - an existing operational site - is to start with a WiFi survey to understand the wireless characteristics of the property. We then use WiFi planning software to work out the optimum placement of access points around the property. We are able to model different layouts and various antenna options to achieve the desired coverage with the minimum number of access points. In this case we were looking at a very busy environment with high traffic and so we opted for higher specification Cisco access points with greater throughput. We were able to install virtual wireless LAN controllers in the customer’s cloud environment to minimise the onsite infrastructure.
This was a relatively straightforward project from our point of view. The client already had the switching infrastructure in place and they were happy with the existing vendor and the support they received from their partner. We were happy to work with the existing partner, and though it adds risk from our point of view when others are involved, in this case there were no issues.
