It depends on the situation. Always have a purpose/intent of why you are doing it. In your scenario, no you dont need a pre-implementation survey and place the up to 3 APs in common sense areas away from obstructive/reflective surfaces and ceiling mounted. However if you're doing a design for new customer then a pre-survey is a great opportunity to also audit the environment for realistic mounting positions, onsite spectrum analysis, photos of switches (port capacity, power availability), and good old fashioned meet and greet face-to-face. Other reasons: 1. simulated design is to provide report for the cabling team for installation 2. to visually showcase the proposed design will solve their coverage/capacity problems. 3. etc. If you're designing a harsher environment (e.g. Hospitals, outdoor WIFI) then 100% you simulated and test propagation onsite with actual access points on tripod. I encourage post-implementation surveys to validate your own work (against a simulated design) and the report will provide guidance to operational support teams which is often not yourself "RF engineer". Also during the post-survey I encourage 802.11 analysis so you can optimise contention levels. The challenge with surveys is that they take time and cost $. So depending on the situation I would encourage surveys as it provides level of assurance and removes some guess-work which is the difference in solving a WIFI issue in 1 month (trial-and-error remotely) or 1 week. Hope you find this useful thewifigeek
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