Hey everyone, need a quick sanity check on a warehouse Wi-Fi design (70×32×12m). Narrow canyons (1.8m wide, 10m high racks with metal/liquids). Clients are strictly Zebra scanners and forklift mounts. Pivoting from ceiling omnis to directional Cisco CW9176D1s shooting down the aisles from the ends (staggered layout). Anyone deployed these in narrow spaces? Looking for best practices on AP spacing to prevent heavy overlap and co-channel interference.
Rack height is only half the story. What are the scanners actually capable of? 2.4 only? 5 GHz? WiFi 6? What’s their min RSSI / roaming requirement from Zebra? Also are those racks full all the time or does inventory change a lot? A warehouse full of paper towels and a warehouse full of canned food can have basically the same floor plan and behave VERY differently RF-wise. I wouldn’t decide AP count yet.
@No_Chart Fair point. Clients are newer Zebras, locked to 5 GHz (getting exact SKUs from ops shortly). Inventory is dynamic, but those liquid aisles are the biggest wildcard — attenuation will fluctuate heavily between fully stocked and bone dry.
Don’t design it like an office and just make a pretty grid of APs on the ceiling. In those skinny aisles you’re basically building RF corridors. Directional APs shooting down the aisle makes a lot more sense, but the details matter — mounting height, angle, rack contents, antenna pattern, etc. And watch the aisle intersections. That’s where you can accidentally create a giant soup of APs all audible at similar levels and the scanners start making dumb roaming decisions. More APs ≠ better WiFi.
Have you figured this out yet? You may end up needing quite a few APs, but that really depends on the rack height, how many aisles you have, and especially what’s being stored on them. What I’d do first is run a proper WiFi survey of the warehouse with something like NetSpot. That’ll give you a much better idea of where the weak areas are and where the APs actually need to go instead of just guessing from the floor plan.
NetSpot can actually be used for the network design part too, btw. You can load the warehouse plan, place the APs, set the wall/material parameters and try different locations before installing anything. Pretty handy if you want to put together a solid design quickly instead of moving APs around after everything’s already mounted.