Can Your Wi-Fi Network Support Demand as Your Team Returns to Work?

Employees returning to the office are entering a different environment than the one they left in March of 2020. There are more empty desks because employees are splitting time between the office and working remotely, whether at home or in shared workspaces. Mobile devices are more prevalent and important than ever. Video meetings have become almost constant, leading to more frequent face-to-face collaboration.

Today’s work environment is great for work-life balance and productivity, but does your organization have the Wi-Fi infrastructure to support it? If your company is using the same hardware as you were pre-pandemic, it’s at least two years old, which is pretty dated for wireless networking technology.

Why Upgrade Wi-Fi Infrastructure

The importance of having a robust & reliable network has a direct impact on a company’s productivity and operations. It is thereby critical to ensure a quality user experience. Older Wi-Fi networks may not provide the performance and coverage required to support more devices and more bandwidth-hungry applications like video and audio. As a result, users are likely to be frustrated by slow speeds, disconnects, and limited range.

You also could be dealing with unknown security gaps and vulnerabilities if you’re using older Wi-Fi technology. A more mobile workforce means a larger attack surface that’s difficult to monitor. Hackers will seek out organizations using older technology because they’re easy targets.

Finally, new wireless features and functionality have been introduced that can help increase performance, productivity, and efficiency. Companies that invest in Wi-Fi upgrades often have a competitive edge over those that don’t.

Introducing Wi-Fi 6

Wi-Fi 5 and the 802.11ac standard became ubiquitous in the workplace several years ago, providing organizations with faster speeds and more spatial streams with less congestion to accommodate the rise of mobile. Wi-Fi 6 kicks it up a notch.

Here are the most important benefits of upgrading to Wi-Fi 6.

Better Performance. With 1,024 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), Wi-Fi 6 quadruples the QAM of Wi-Fi 5, resulting in more throughput and capacity and faster speeds.
Spatial Streams. Wi-Fi 6 routers and access points (APs) can support 8×8 spatial streams compared to 4×4 for Wi-Fi 5. This translates to more devices supported with greater efficiency, which contributes to better performance.
One AP, Multiple Clients. With 802.11ac, one device could communicate with an AP at a time. 802.11ax and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) make it possible for an AP to support multiple clients at the same time in a Wi-Fi 6 network, using smaller channels within channels for applications that don’t use much bandwidth.
More Reliable MU-MIMO. Multiuser multiple-input, multiple outputs (MU-MIMO) antenna configurations exist with Wi-Fi 5, but they haven’t been reliable. Wi-Fi 6 delivers on the original promise of MU-MIMO, which supports both uplink and downlink directions.

Getting the Wi-Fi Network Design Right

This is essential to taking full advantage of Wi-Fi 6. Plan for capacity by accounting for types of applications, device density, peak demand, etc. Capacity is the top priority, but you need to make sure key areas have coverage.

Optimal WLAN design is critical to ensure maximum performance of all mobile devices. Roaming happens very often in today’s workplace, so you need APs and/or management software that enable fast roaming to minimize application latency.

If your network hardware is not Wi-Fi 6-enabled, Rahi can help you plan and execute a refresh. Our team can:

Perform a predictive wireless survey to optimize AP placement
Recommend a new network design
Decommission old hardware
Provide a Certificate of Data Destruction for network equipment
Deploy a new Wireless network
Perform user acceptance testing and a post-validation wireless survey

Contact Rahi today to discuss the state of your Wi-Fi network and what an upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 will entail.