How many WiFi access points does a villa need?

The router in the corner of the garage was never going to reach the majlis. Everyone knows it, and yet many villas still get their WiFi as an afterthought: one box from the internet provider, a mesh kit from the mall when that box gives up, and then a decade of hearing that the WiFi is bad upstairs. What follows is how we design villa WiFi instead, and the reasoning behind every access point on the ceiling.

Roughly one access point for every 100 square metres

We count access points floor by floor, at roughly one for every 100 square metres, and no floor is ever left without one. A household with an unusually large number of connected devices may need more, and the design adds them when it does. Outside, one shared access point serves the terrace, the pool and the barbecue; coverage for the wider garden or the gate is there if you ask for it.

Indoors, every enclosed space is somewhere the signal has to reach: the bedrooms, the majlis, the kitchen, the corridors, the garage, the plant room and the staff rooms. The rooms we leave out of the automation are not left out of the WiFi, for the simple reason that a maid's room with no keypad still has a phone in it.

Every access point is wired back to the rack

Each access point sits on the ceiling with its own cable running home to the rack. It is not a repeater, and it is not a mesh node relaying traffic to another node through two walls. Mesh and repeaters have no place in our designs, because a wireless backhaul gives up speed at every hop and struggles most where the walls are thickest, which in a villa is almost everywhere.

That makes WiFi a first-fix decision, since the cable has to be in the ceiling before the ceiling is closed. It is also why the access points belong to the same design as the lighting and the cameras, listed on the same contractor schedule with the same heights and cable types, rather than being added later by whoever turns up with a mesh kit.

Family, devices and guests on separate networks

Inside the villa, the traffic is divided three ways. The main network belongs to the family. A second network carries the screens, the cameras and everything else that never needs to talk to your laptop. The guest network is isolated from both, so a visitor's phone cannot see your cameras. Each is one network across the whole house, and every access point comes from the same brand, because mixing brands is a reliable way to break roaming from room to room.

A rack sized for the whole villa

All those access points need power and a switch to plug into. The switch delivers power over the network cable, and it is sized in watts and in ports for the whole villa, with the cameras counted alongside the access points and 20% kept spare. It shares the rack with the camera recorder and a UPS, because the WiFi should ride through a power blink even when the lights do not. The rack has its own place on the plan, in the network room or wherever the drawing puts it, and where the drawing is silent, we ask rather than assume.

Access points in unconditioned spaces such as the garage or the plant room are rated for the heat, and the outdoor point is rated for the outdoors.

What coverage means before anyone has surveyed the house

Before a survey, coverage means placement intent. We do not draw heat maps and we do not promise signal levels from a floor plan, because nobody honest can: walls, glass and furniture decide the last few metres. The design marks indicative coverage zones as "subject to survey", and a survey of the finished villa is what confirms them. If that survey finds a gap, the switch already has spare capacity to take another access point, which is the point of designing the network in the first place.

What it costs, and what you are paying for

Access points and switches are products you can price for yourself online, and our bill lists them at MSRP, line by line, so you can compare them. There is no cleverness to sell you here. The engineering lies in where the access points go and how they are wired, and that is part of the design on the bill.

Send us your plans and count the dots on your ceiling before the ceiling is closed.