The usual sequence: Wi-Fi is weak near the back, so someone buys a second router and plugs it in there. It helps for a week. Then calls drop when people walk between the two, the back half gets slower under load, and a third router appears.
Almost every small-office Wi-Fi complaint we’re called about is one of four things, and more hardware fixes none of them.
1. Everyone is on the same channels
2.4 GHz has three non-overlapping channels in India: 1, 6 and 11. That’s three. Every other channel overlaps its neighbours, and overlapping transmitters don’t politely share — they interfere, and both sides retransmit.
In a typical commercial building you’re seeing twenty other networks. If your two access points are on channels 3 and 8, they’re interfering with each other and with several neighbours. Two APs on 1 and 11 will comfortably outperform four APs on random channels.
The corollary: 5 GHz has far more usable channels and much less congestion. It doesn’t travel as far or through as many walls, which is a feature — shorter range means less interference between your own APs. Most offices should be pushing everything they can onto 5 GHz and treating 2.4 GHz as the fallback for old devices and things across the building.
2. The access points are in the wrong places
Consumer routers get installed where the internet cable enters — a corner, often inside a cupboard, at floor level, behind the UPS. That’s an admission of defeat before you start.
APs belong on the ceiling, in the middle of the space they serve, in open air. The difference between a router in a metal cabinet in the corner and a ceiling-mounted AP in the centre is not subtle; it’s routinely the entire problem.
For a floor plate, the rule of thumb is one AP per 1,000–1,500 sq ft of open office, fewer if it’s a hall, more if it’s cabins with brick walls. Glass partitions are fine. Brick, concrete and the mirrored/metallised glass common in Indian commercial buildings are not.
3. Roaming was never configured
Two separate routers with the same network name are not a mesh, and they do not hand devices over. Your phone picks one and holds onto it until the signal is nearly gone — which is exactly when you’re mid-call in the corridor.
Real roaming needs APs that are managed together and support the roaming standards (802.11k/v/r). That’s the actual functional difference between “two routers” and “an access point system,” and it’s why the second router never fixed the problem.
4. The uplink, not the Wi-Fi
Sometimes Wi-Fi is fine and the internet connection is saturated, or the AP is connected back to the switch over a tired cable negotiating at 100 Mbps. Worth eliminating before buying anything: plug a laptop in by cable at the same spot and test. If wired is also bad, it was never Wi-Fi.
The survey
Before buying hardware, an hour with a laptop and a Wi-Fi analyser tells you: which channels your neighbours occupy, what your actual signal is at each desk, where the dead zones are, and how many APs the space genuinely needs.
That hour routinely prevents buying the wrong number of the wrong access points, and it converts “the Wi-Fi is bad” — which can’t be acted on — into a floor plan with positions and channel assignments, which can.
One more thing worth doing at the same time: put the guest network on its own segment while you’re in there. It’s a config change during work you’re already doing, and it closes off the most common way an untrusted device gets inside your network.
Networks & Wi-Fi — Wi-Fi planning, channel design and remote tuning from your controller data. The physical work is done by you or your contractor, to a specification we write.