Networking
Do you really need managed switches?
Sometimes the honest answer is no. Here is how to tell which case you are in.
"The Wi-Fi is slow" is one of the most common calls we get, and the instinctive fix — buy better access points — resolves it perhaps a third of the time. The other two thirds are these.
The usual approach is to divide the floor area by a coverage figure from a datasheet. Those figures come from open space with no obstructions. A plasterboard wall costs a few decibels; a concrete core or a lift shaft can cost most of the signal.
The symptom is a device that shows three bars but performs badly — it has associated at a low data rate, and because slow clients occupy airtime, that one device degrades everyone nearby.
This is what a survey is for: measuring actual signal in the actual building rather than calculating it from a drawing.
In the 2.4 GHz band there are three non-overlapping channels. In an office building you are sharing them with every business on your floor and the two above.
Two mistakes are common. Adjacent access points configured on overlapping channels interfere with each other — self-inflicted and easy to fix. And 2.4 GHz transmit power set to maximum, which extends your interference footprint without improving usable throughput.
The 5 GHz band has far more channels and is the right place for anything that matters. Where devices support it, 6 GHz is cleaner still.
A modern access point can move more traffic than a 1 Gbit uplink carries. If several APs share a switch with a single gigabit uplink to the core, the constraint is the cable, not the radio.
Check the wired path: AP to switch, switch to core, core to firewall, firewall to internet. The slowest link in that chain is your actual ceiling — and replacing the access points does not move it.
Wi-Fi is a shared medium. Thirty devices in a meeting room take turns, and every slow device consumes disproportionate airtime.
Meeting rooms, canteens and training rooms need to be designed as high-density areas — more access points at lower transmit power, with band steering pushing capable clients to 5 GHz. Coverage-based planning consistently under-provisions exactly these rooms.
Guest devices, staff laptops, phones, printers, cameras and production equipment all sharing one VLAN produces broadcast traffic that every device must process, and no way to prioritise anything.
Separate at minimum: staff, guest, and devices. It improves performance, and more importantly it means a compromised guest phone is not sitting on the same segment as your servers.
A meaningful share of "slow Wi-Fi" reports are a saturated internet line, an overloaded firewall, a DNS server timing out, or one machine running a backup across the network in the middle of the day.
The diagnostic is straightforward: test throughput to something on the local network, then to the internet. If local is fast and internet is slow, the wireless is fine and the problem is further out.
Doing the last step first is how businesses end up with new hardware and the same complaint.
Ask us about network infrastructure, or request a free assessment directly.
Sometimes the honest answer is no. Here is how to tell which case you are in.
The problem is rarely moving day. It is the internet line arriving late.
The model number goes up and so does the price. But which one does your office actually need?