Need a WiFi survey/design tool for occasional jobs

General Discussion
1

Small MSP here. We don’t do wireless design every week, but a few customers a year need something more serious than “put an AP around here and see what happens.”

I’ve got a project coming up in a 4-story building that’s being renovated.

They want us to figure out AP placement before the install, then come back afterward and verify the actual coverage. I’d also like something that produces decent heatmaps/reports I can hand to the client without needing to explain 40 screenshots.

Ekahau looks great, but between the software and hardware it’s hard for me to justify for the amount of survey work we actually do.

Ideally I’d like:

  • predictive planning before deployment

  • actual walk-around surveys afterward

  • multi-floor support

  • something simple enough that I can send a junior tech around with a tablet for data collection

  • no giant recurring license bill if I only use it on a handful of projects

What’s everyone using for that middle ground these days?

2

If wireless design becomes a real part of your business, Ekahau + Sidekick is still the safe answer. But for “a few projects a year”? Yeah, that’s a painful amount of money to have sitting on a shelf for ten months.

3

NetSpot 6 is ideal for this scenario. I especially liked the multi-floor planning feature in the latest updates. You build the entire building instead of fiddling with individual maps. This allows you to see how the signal flows from floor to floor. It’s perfect for a remodeling project.

4

@MemoryEffective51 Does it account for the floor itself or is it basically just stacking the drawings?

5

It accounts for it. You can define the floor slab material/thickness, align the levels, and draw openings where there’s no slab — stairwells, shafts, atriums, that kind of thing. So if you’ve got an AP on floor 2, you can see what it’s predicted to contribute above and below instead of pretending every floor exists in isolation.