The router your provider lends you is designed for a home: few devices, little concurrency and nobody losing money when it goes down. An office has all three the other way round.
What goes wrong when you use home kit
- Concurrency. It copes with few active connections and with thirty devices it starts dropping them.
- Roaming. As you walk across the office, the laptop clings to the far-away access point and the video call cuts out. Business systems hand the device from one access point to the next without you noticing.
- No segmentation. The TV in the meeting room, the visitor’s phone and the invoicing server all sit on the same network.
- No visibility. You do not know who is connected, what they are using, or why it fails.
- And it is not even yours. If the provider swaps it, your configuration disappears with it.
What a corporate Wi-Fi network needs
- A coverage survey with real measurements, not access points placed by eye.
- Centrally managed access points with roaming properly sorted out.
- A guest network isolated from the working network, and another one for connected devices.
- Per-user access instead of a shared password that half the province ends up knowing.
- Proper cabling and power: a good access point that is badly connected is worth nothing.
How to tell whether yours is up to scratch
You measure it. Before and after, at the same spots and at the same times: coverage, real speed by area, latency and hops between access points. If nobody shows you numbers, what they are selling you is a feeling.
