Maximum coverage per Meraki MR44 AP

[Roey1984]

Hello

We are soon moving to a new office.

The entire space would be 1200 Square meters in size.

We will have 20 rooms and the reset would be open space \ lounge \ small boots, etc.

Will 2 units of Meraki MR44 AP be sufficient for this space? or it is recommended to add more?

All AP units will be connected to two MS120 switches & a Single MX75 router.

Moreover, since the MS120 series is not stackable, what is the best practice in terms of connectivity?

Thank you all!

[KarstenI]

With that size and that many rooms you will likely need more APs. Do yourself a favour and let someone do a proper WLAN-design or you will surely end up with unhappy users.

[BrandonS]

Do you have a floor plan and know the building materials like concrete, drywall, ceiling heights, etc.?  Also, what types of wireless clients and requirements?  Voice and video or just light browsing and email?  All new WiFi 6 devices or some mix of iot and 2.4GHz required? We might be able to give a rough suggestion with that, but otherwise your guess is as good as any..

For the switches you can just uplink them for a small network like this.  No need for high speed stacking, really.

Best.

[Roey1984]

Thank you for the answer, Brandon.

Tomorrow I`ll have the floor plans and according to that, I will know what materials we will have there.

The users are 50% dev`s and 50% sales \ Marketing and have a lot of A/V conferences.

20% will use new workstations (connected via LAN), and the rest 80% are using wifi  (MacBook Pro 2019-2021 models)

So I guess we will have a mixed 2.4 \ 5ghz \ wifi 6 env`

BTW, as per my understanding, it is suggested to place the MR44 on the walls, and not on the ceiling, is that correct?

Since they have omnidirectional antennas.

What are your thoughts man?

[PhilipDAth]

2 or 3 units would be about right when considering only m^2.  If this is a dense urban area I would try and get MR56s instead.

The coverage pattern is like a mushroom.  It's wider on the sides and less straight up and down.  I would mount them on the roof if you can.

I would connect the two switches with a pair of Ethernet channels and enable port aggregation.

[Roey1984]

Thank you!

Regarding the switches, do you think that Connecting them to one another via Ethernet cable is better than connecting each of them directly to the MX75 and enabling Virtual Stacking?

[PhilipDAth]

You can use virtual stacking no matter what way you connect them.

Are you going to have servers in the office that people will be accessing?  They go for link aggregation.  If everyone is only accessing the Internet they it doesn't make much difference and you can just patch directly to the MX75.

[Roey1984]

No no, our company is SaaS-based.

No servers indoors, all in AWS

Perfect ! ill patch them directly to the ports of the MX 

Thank you man, you helped a lot

[GIdenJoe]

No it's the other way around, ceiling mount is usually better because you have more coverage around the AP.
However outside of the coverage you need you will need to account for bandwidth too.

Ask yourself how many clients will be connected at any one time and how much bandwidth guarantee do you need to give to all those connected clients.  Also are there any other AP's from adjacent buildings/floors that will also take some airtime away.

A tool like Ekahau will calculate the airtime utilization based on your bandwidth requirements so you can easily see if you need to add more AP's or not.  Also channel planning needs to be done too.  Usually you don't go over 40 MHz channel width unless you have enough free channel space in your area.

[Roey1984]

I understand.

At most, we will have between 50-60 users working from the office.

I'm attaching here the diagram of this model MR44 - its a bit hard to understand its coverage since its omnidirectional antennas 

Do you think it's a must to do a site survey with Ekahau and check for the best location of the AP?

it's a bit costly, I'm not sure they will approve it

[PhilipDAth]

If you want good performance, I would go with 3 APs based on user count.  That gives an average of 20 users per AP (a good performance ratio).

[GIdenJoe]

If it's a simple floorplan with especially drywalls and light glass the survey can be purely done predictively.
A single office floor with not too many walls can easily be done in a few hours.

So if you know a professional that can do a 'light' survey then go for it.  It will save you trouble tickets afterwards.  I just can't stress enough the bandwidth considerations.

You could also go onsite yourself with a simple smartphone app that shows the signals of neighboring AP's.

[Roey1984]

Thank you, Joe

I understand that its important to do at least a light site survey

I'll talk to my manger and get an approval to do so

thank you again

[GIdenJoe]

Best of luck in this endeavour! 🙂

[JM4]

As this is a new Office it would be a very a good idea to carry out a site survey.
Each access point will need a network connection back to your switches.

You should probably over provision on data points in case you need to add more APs at a later date.

Don't need to patch them into the switch, just have them them available and locations documented should the office layout change.
Cheaper to run some Cat 6 now then find out after you have done the build out.