Network Design, Installation, and Management
Coverage or capacity
Decide first whether the design is coverage-driven (warehouse, outdoor) or capacity-driven (dense office, auditorium). Capacity designs shrink cells, add APs, and plan for client count and airtime per AP rather than signal alone. Airtime is the real currency: a handful of low-rate or legacy clients can consume most of it.
Channel planning
In 2.4 GHz only channels 1, 6 and 11 are non-overlapping in North America; reuse them aggressively and avoid 40 MHz there. In 5 GHz use the UNII bands (36–48, 52–64, 100–144, 149–165), remembering DFS channels require radar detection and may be vacated. Separate co-channel cells physically and never allow adjacent-channel overlap. Use 20 MHz as the default building block and widen only where the plan supports it.
Physical installation
Mount APs below ceiling clutter, away from metal, elevators and microwaves, at consistent heights, with documented cable runs under 100 m and verified PoE. Note mounting hardware, aesthetics and future service access.
Management
Document floor plans, BSSIDs, channel/power plan, VLANs, SSIDs, firmware baselines, backups and change control. Use NTP, syslog, SNMP/NMS polling and controller dashboards; monitor channel utilization, retries, client counts and noise floor against thresholds.
Traps
Planning 40 MHz in 2.4 GHz; assuming more APs means more capacity without a channel plan; and ignoring switch uplink and PoE capacity.
Rule of thumb
Keep channel utilization below roughly 50% for voice and latency-sensitive traffic; sustained utilization above about 70% is a capacity redesign trigger.