How Many Access Points Does a Dubai Office Floor Need?

Count devices and rooms, not square metres. A floor plate covered by coverage maths alone will have dead spots in the meeting rooms and a slow patch around the largest group of desks, because the number that decides access point count in an office is capacity, not range.

Here is the method we use, and the local factors that change the answer in a UAE building.

Start from devices, not people

Every person on a modern office floor carries two or three connected devices. A laptop, a phone, often a tablet or a watch. Assume between two and three active devices per seat, then add the fixed wireless equipment: printers, room panels, signage, handheld scanners in a warehouse.

As a working rule for an office where people run video calls, plan for roughly 25 to 30 active devices per access point radio. In a boardroom or a training room where everyone joins the same call, plan for fewer. That rule is deliberately conservative, and the reason is that wireless is a shared medium: every device on a channel waits its turn, so the fastest way to make Wi-Fi feel quick is to put fewer devices on each radio.

A floor of 60 desks with two and a half devices each is around 150 devices, which points to five or six access points on capacity grounds before you have looked at the walls.

Then look at the walls, because UAE fit-outs are not open plan

Coverage assumptions built for an open floor collapse in a typical Dubai office. Glass partitions with metal frames, solid blockwork around cores and service risers, full height gypsum walls around director offices, and mirrored or coated glass on the facade all attenuate signal. Six GHz, which is the band that makes Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 worth buying, attenuates more than 5 GHz through the same wall.

The practical consequences:

  • Enclosed meeting rooms usually need their own access point rather than coverage borrowed from the corridor. A room that hosts the company's most important calls is the wrong place to economise.
  • Corner offices behind two solid walls are a common dead spot.
  • Lift lobbies and stair cores block signal rather than carry it, so an access point placed for map symmetry often serves half the area you expect.
  • Ceiling voids with dense services can detune an access point mounted above the tiles. Mount below the tile where the design allows it.

A survey is cheaper than the rework

A predictive survey takes the floor plan, the wall construction and the device count, and produces a placement plan and a count before you order anything. A validation survey after installation walks the floor and proves the design, which is when you find out that the boardroom sits in a shadow.

Both are inexpensive against the cost of buying four access points, cabling them, and then discovering you needed seven in different places. In a fit-out the cabling is the expensive part, and it is the part you cannot redo cheaply once ceilings are closed.

Placement rules that avoid the usual mistakes

  • Spread them out. Two access points close together interfere with each other and serve fewer users than one placed properly. More units badly placed is worse than fewer units placed well.
  • Mount on the ceiling, facing down. Access points above tiles, in cupboards, behind pillars or on their side all radiate somewhere other than at your users.
  • Keep them off the walls for indoor coverage. A wall mounted unit throws half its pattern into the neighbouring tenancy.
  • Turn the power down, not up. Raising transmit power makes cells overlap and clients cling to distant access points. A denser design at lower power performs better.
  • Plan channels deliberately. The UAE allows indoor use of 5925 to 6425 MHz, which is 500 MHz of 6 GHz spectrum rather than the 1200 MHz available in the United States and Saudi Arabia. That limits how many wide channels you can reuse on one floor, which is covered in our guide to Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 for Dubai offices.

What sits behind the access points matters as much

Each access point needs a cable run, a switch port and power. Cat 6A is the sensible cabling standard for anything you expect to keep, and tri-band units frequently want 802.3bt power rather than PoE+. Check the switch power budget across all ports, not the per port rating, and check the uplink from that switch, because a floor of fast access points behind a single gigabit uplink is a floor with a bottleneck. Our guide to choosing a network switch for a Dubai office covers the sizing.

Rough starting points

These are starting points for a quotation, not a design. A survey moves them.

  • Small office, up to 20 staff, open plan with two meeting rooms: two or three access points, with one dedicated to the larger meeting room.
  • Single floor, 50 to 80 staff, mixed open plan and offices: five to eight, plus one per enclosed meeting room over eight seats.
  • Training room or auditorium: size on devices in the room, not area, and expect more than one unit.
  • Warehouse in Jebel Ali or Al Quoz: count by racking aisles and scanner roaming paths rather than floor area. Racking full of stock blocks signal that an empty warehouse does not.
  • Retail showroom: plan for customer devices as well as staff, and separate guest traffic onto its own network.

Getting the count right before you order

The count follows the device list, the wall construction and the room layout. Anyone who quotes an access point count from floor area alone has not been given enough information to answer.

Codeeo Tech supplies wireless from Cisco, Aruba, HPE and Huawei, along with the switching and power behind it, to businesses across the UAE. Send your floor plan and headcount through the contact page and we will come back with a count and a placement plan rather than a list of boxes.

Cover photo: Jumeirah Lakes Towers Park @ Dubai by Guilhem Vellut, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).