Best Practices for Enterprise Wireless Network Design

If you’ve used a wireless network before (which let’s be honest, it’s 2017, you definitely have), you’re sure to notice that your service drops significantly as you move further from the access point. Below, we’ve collected a list of some of the top methods and practices for improving your network capacity and range.

Add Additional Cell Sites

While a bit expensive, adding cell sites to your network is a highly effective method for adding capacity to your wireless network. Keep in mind this approach can be very time intensive and can be increasingly prohibitive.

Modulation and Coding

Another way to improve the capacity of a wireless channel is to increase the amount of bits coded per Hz. By improving the modulation and coding technique

Smart Antennas

Smart antennas ( are able to provide significant increase in throughput. Smart antennas, also referred to as MIMO (Multiple input, multiple output) are antenna arrays with smart signal processing algorithms used to identify spatial signal signatures.

Add Sectors

Adding sectors is a great way to approximate the introduction of new cells. That being said, this increase becomes less effective with every sector added.

MAC Aggregation

One common technique for for improving network capacity is by reducing the overhead of packet transmissions by aggregating multiple packets and by reducing the amount of acknowledged packets. This approach is called MAC aggregation and is supported by all 802.11n and 802.11ac devices.

Add Carriers

By adding carriers, you’ll be directly increasing your network capacity. The LTE standard is noticeably powerful when using increased bandwidth without always increasing control channel overheads.

Improved Air Interface Capabilities

Improved air interface capabilities such as in evolving from universal mobile telecommunications system) to high speed downlink packet access that provided