A lot of good pointers in all the replies. And I'd agree I cannot think of a time when I'd have 3 APs within 15 feet of one another in a relatively open space or 8 APs for a 4,000 square foot relatively open area of conference rooms. The vendor who did the RF test, did they conduct an actual RF Site Survey of the 4000 square foot space? Are there 8 conference rooms and they simply defaulted to an AP-per-room? Regardless of the situation, the answer to "how many APs do I need" is ALWAYS "it depends" on multiple variables and figures of merit. If they just said they wanted to do an AP per conference room, or in your case perhaps an AP per 500 square feet, you may be sorely disappointed with the deployment. Like in home construction an important figure of merit is span, the distance between support columns, and are you measuring that under dead load or live load for example when measuring how long a joist needs to be. And are you considering the type of flooring to be used or how much deflection is within acceptable limits, etc. The point is it's a complex composite of many variables. In wifi there are a few critical figures of merit, and one of the most critical is duty cycle (channel utilization). So the answer to all other wifi design questions is "it depends" and hinges on what is going to drive the channel utilization. The point is that it’s a half-duplex shared medium, channel utilization is a critical figure of merit, and voice (for example) has a dramatic impact on channel utilization. You must also consider the capabilities of the client devices (or at least a likely mix of client devices) so you can get an idea of airtime consumption. This approach will tend to raise all the natural questions about what applications must be supported, what protocols are being used and what the application traffic footprints look like, what are the capabilities of the clients with regards to channel width and spatial streams, etc. And only then can you start designing a plan for AP placement and a 5GHz channel plan. Once you come to an estimate of airtime consumption you can estimate the number of APs required to serve a given number of devices over a certain area. Here's a little more info on doing a quick & simple estimate in this other post https://community.meraki.com/t5/Wireless-LAN/Maximum-number-of-clients-on-MR84-access-point/td-p/4786 All that said, there can be exceptions. In your case, if they recommended 8 APs, maybe for 8 conference rooms, maybe they specified the MR30H as a table-top AP in each conference room? I've seen library deployments of that nature work well for example, as if each "study/conference group" of 5 to 10 people has a dedicated AP. Or college dorm rooms and hotel rooms with MR30H where there might be an AP per room and perhaps only 15 to 20 feet apart.
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