Does increasing the number of access points lead to better Wi-Fi coverage?

Unlike the wired network, where increasing the number of wired switches gives a higher capacity network and allows more devices to connect to it, increasing the number of stand alone access points (over a fixed area) in a wireless network might create more connectivity/packet loss issues for all the clients connecting to them, than providing higher capacity/increased Wi-Fi coverage.

To understand why this is so, you need to understand what are wireless frequency bands and what is wireless interference.

Consider what might happen if a group of IETF engineers stay in a hotel whose Wi-Fi network suffers from sub-optimal performance due to poorly planned and over-subscribed stand-alone access point based Wi-Fi network? Well, they re-engineer the Wi-Fi network! Among other improvements, they decide to implement the following steps to improve Wi-Fi coverage.

“-Decreasing the AP receiver sensitivity ([changing] HP/Colubris configuration “distance” from “large” to “small”)

– Increasing the minimum data and multicast rate from 1Mbps to 2Mbps;

– Decreasing the transmit power from 20dBm to 10dBm;

– And, turning off the radios on numerous APs to reduce the [RF] noise”

The above is a small excerpt taken from this excellent article on Network World. Read it to understand how one can improve a large stand-alone access point based Wi-Fi network.

Of course, having a wireless controller to provide centralized radio management and network planning tools would have optimized the Wi-Fi controller without much manual intervention.

excITingIP.com

You could stay up to date on the various computer networking/enterprise IT technologies by subscribing to this blog with your email address in the sidebar box that says, ‘Get email updates when new articles are published’