A practical guide to WiFi surveys that actually predict real-world coverage

If your business runs on WiFi and your last "survey" was a walkthrough with a phone, this one's for you. The full engagement sits under our WiFi surveys service.

The three surveys, in order

Predictive. A software model of the space with your APs placed in it. Cheap, fast, catches obvious mistakes before hardware ships.
Passive on-site. A quiet walk-through measuring the actual radio environment. Tells you what your neighbors and interference are doing to your real signal.
Post-install validation. After the APs are up, walk it again against your device mix and SLAs. This is the one people skip; it's the only one that answers "does it actually work."

What to demand in a deliverable

Heatmaps for signal strength and SNR not just one.
Channel plan with a clear rationale.
Interference report naming the sources.
BOM sized to actual load, not the vendor's default.
Roaming plan for the devices you care about (phones, scanners, kiosks).

The single most common failure

Deploying enough APs but at the wrong power. WiFi is a two-way conversation; if your APs shout and your devices whisper, throughput dies. Passive surveys catch this; walkthroughs don't. If the uplink itself is the suspect, that's a job for network support rather than another AP.

For the quarterly discipline that keeps a mature network healthy, pair this with the data-center hygiene checklist.

If you're weighing WiFi upgrades against expanding uplink capacity, we can look at both.