I am looking for recommendations for AP density for a 100,000 sq foot warehouse. I have a lot of experience with networking and APs, but we have not done any deployments in a warehouse.
The ceilings are about 35 feet tall, and the space is about 330X320 feet. there will be about 7 Aisles with about 20-30 feet of dead space between metal racks. I am leaning towards U6 enterprise APs I used the Unifi design tool, but I wanted to get some ideas from someone that has done a warehouse recently. They are looking to have about 250 devices connected to wifi.
We have a WH about that size utilizing Cisco APs. We currently have approx. 10 APs for the area but are adding 10 more to fill coverage weak areas utilizing only 5GHz bands. All of our warehouse APs are dropped to approx. 15-18 feet from the floor via conduit and boxes. This leaves enough clearance for forklift traffic while getting the APs closer to the ground.
If the warehouse will have tall racking (15ft+) then you really need to do directional antennas down each aisle (from both ends if its long enough). This is the only way we have had success, from a plumbing supply company with 11 main warehouses (500,000+ sqft) and dozens of smaller ones (maybe the fact that most of our stuff is metal is related, but the shelving is going to be metal regardless, so…) Sadly Unifi doesn’t have high end directional antennas nor models that work with external antennas ( the AC-Mesh or Swiss Army Knife aren’t suitable), so this is a deployment they can’t properly support.
I don’t believe the Unifi Design Tool has the appropriate wall/obstacle options to account for metal shelving. No predictive design is going to get it right, but others have more robust options. But that’s a factor of paid vs free.
We did a project very similar and using more WiFi to solve the problem of lots of metal racks was the solution we went with. This project is still going great from over 4 year ago.
Thanks for the response, have you done any installs more recently? Since these would be u6 long ranges would you still go with the same amount of APS to cover 40,000 square foot? Unifi aps have changed quite a bit in 4 years.
The problem is the shelves themselves blocking and reflecting signals. Using LR units makes this problem worse, not better. If not using directional antennas then you want lots of APs at low power.
EDIT: The LRs themselves aren’t an issue if they are running at less than max power. The LR units do have better reception circuitry than the others, which is an important part of increasing range. In a high reflection environment, I’m not sure whether that helps or hurts. @LTS_Tom in that video there are no details about how it worked once they put the shelving up and started using it. Are you able to share what power settings ended up being used?
Edit2: Also are you able to share if and how the rows of APs was aligned to the rows of shelving? This has been the biggest impact in my experience, if you expect a row of APs to cover three rows of shelving then you are highly dependent on what exactly is stored on those shelves.