We’re opening a small business soon and I’m trying to get the network sorted before we move in.
Space is about 2700 sq ft, single floor, long rectangular layout. Fiber comes in at the rear of the unit and unfortunately the office is not open-plan — lots of separate rooms and walls between the front and back.
We’ll have around 4–5 desktops using cloud software, several TVs and streaming devices, plus employee phones and laptops. We’ll probably want guest WiFi too.
Right now I’m looking at either a TP-Link Archer AXE7800 with an extender, or a TP-Link Deco WiFi 7 mesh system.
I don’t need anything insanely complicated, but I also don’t want to spend money on consumer gear now and replace everything six months later.
Which direction would you go?
For a business? Honestly, neither would be my first choice. Not because they can’t provide WiFi, but because you’re already talking about employees, guests and multiple rooms. I’d rather have a separate router/firewall and a couple wired APs than one giant spider-router at the back of the building trying to scream through every wall.
Consumer mesh would probably work for an office that size. But if you use it, wire the nodes if at all possible. Wireless mesh is convenient, but putting a node at the opposite end of the office only helps if that node itself has a decent connection back to the main one.
@ShadowBoxer_882 We’re doing cabling before opening, so Ethernet between locations is definitely possible.
Then I wouldn’t design around wireless mesh at all. Pull the cable now. Future-you will thank present-you.
Before buying either, I’d figure out how many APs you actually need. 2700 sq ft means almost nothing without the floor plan. Twenty-seven hundred square feet of open showroom and twenty-seven hundred square feet chopped into offices can behave completely differently. NetSpot’s Planning mode is useful for this.
@Quantum_Fluke That’s probably smarter than me buying a mesh kit and moving nodes around after we open. Can it actually account for the walls?
Model the walls/materials, place the APs and compare the predicted coverage. It’s still predictive, obviously, so survey the finished office afterward. But it gives the cabling guys a much better starting point than “maybe put one somewhere in the middle”.
Please don’t buy an extender if you already have the opportunity to run Ethernet. You have contractors, open walls and a fresh install. This is basically the one moment in the life of the building when cable is cheap.