Your Wi-Fi Is Why Your Office Feels Slow

A client called me last month convinced their internet was broken. It wasn't. Their fiber was fine. What was broken was the $180 router sitting on top of a filing cabinet in the corner, trying to cover 4,000 square feet of drywall, ductwork, and 17 people on Zoom.

The router in the corner is the problem

Almost every 10-20 person office I walk into has the same setup: one consumer-grade router the ISP dropped off, shoved wherever the cable came through the wall. That worked when you were five people in one room. It does not work when half the office is on video calls and the other half is pushing files to the cloud.

The tell is always the same. Calls drop in the back conference room. The person by the kitchen has full bars but pages load slow. Someone reboots the router twice a week. Everyone blames Comcast. Comcast is not the problem. The problem is you're asking one radio to cover a space it was never designed to cover, through walls it can't punch through, for a headcount it can't handle.

What to buy instead

Stop shopping for a bigger router. Buy access points. Specifically, three or four ceiling-mount access points wired back to a small PoE switch. Ubiquiti UniFi is what I install for offices this size. Around $180 per AP, one $150 switch, one $170 controller (or run the software on any spare mini PC), and you're done. Ballpark $1,200-1,500 in hardware for a 5,000 sq ft office. That's less than one month of a bad MSP retainer.

The two things that matter:

• One SSID across the whole office. Devices roam between APs automatically. No more "Office-WiFi-2" and "Office-WiFi-Upstairs" nonsense.
• APs on the ceiling, not on a desk. Wi-Fi radiates like a lightbulb. You would not put a lamp behind a filing cabinet and expect the room to be lit.

Ship it this month, tune it next month

You do not need a site survey. You do not need a consultant with a heat map. Put an AP roughly every 1,500 square feet, run cheap Cat6 through the drop ceiling, plug it in. If one corner is still dead in two weeks, add a fourth AP. Iterate. The whole install is one afternoon plus a cable run, and any competent local low-voltage guy will do the wiring for a few hundred bucks.

The reason to do this now, before you hire your next five people, is that the pain scales faster than the headcount. Ten people on bad Wi-Fi is annoying. Twenty poeple on bad Wi-Fi is a daily productivity tax you're paying in five-minute increments no one is measuring.

If your office has the dead-corner problem, or the every-Tuesday-someone-reboots-the-router problem, that's the exact cleanup we do for growing teams. Send us a note and we'll talk through what your space actually needs.

— Alexander @ SBATC