Network & data center services
Wi-Fi Site Surveys & Heat Mapping
A Wi-Fi site survey is the cheapest document in a wireless project and it decides every number after it — how many access points, which mounting positions, how much power the closet has to deliver and how much cable has to be pulled.
We scope it as a named line on the deployment quote rather than as a favour folded into the hardware.
- Scope
- Predictive modeling · on-site validation · placement plan
- Deliverables
- Heat maps, channel and power plan, mounting and cabling schedule
- Design order
- Coverage requirement first — access point count comes out last
- Boundary
- A survey is a design deliverable, never a coverage guarantee
Tell us the project — Wi-Fi site survey
Tell us where to reach you and a Uniqcli specialist follows up by email to scope the work with you — what has to be covered, how many sites or buildings, and what already exists — then comes back with a quoted bill of materials across the equipment, the software licensing and the deployment work.
Priced against your own site rather than a package tier, sourced through authorized US distribution and screened line by line. We specify, supply, stage and integrate; internet access is scoped separately from the equipment on this page, and operating the network stays with your team or the provider you contract.
The first number is our real one, not an opening one.
Tell us the scope and we come back with the best price we can do on it.
- Supporting federal, state & local purchasers
- GPC & P-Card accepted
- TAA & NDAA-889 screening before every quote
Live catalog prices for in-stock hardware, shown as a starting point — your quote is scoped to the site and includes the licensing and services the job needs.
The access point count is an output, not an input
Most wireless quotes open with an access point count somebody derived from square footage, and most wireless disappointments begin at exactly that line. Square footage does not know that the north wing is poured concrete and the south wing is glass, that warehouse racking behaves like a wall once it is full, or that the oldest handheld still in service gives up ten feet before a laptop does.
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A Wi-Fi site survey turns the requirement — what has to connect, where, at what density, at what usable rate — into positions on a drawing. Wi-Fi heat mapping is the visible half of that work: a per-band picture of signal and signal-to-noise across the floor, held against thresholds written down before anybody reads a colour off the map. The access point count falls out at the end, and it is rarely the number the square footage suggested.
Predictive and on-site answer different questions
A predictive model and an on-site walk are not competing products and one does not replace the other. One is where you can afford to be wrong; the other is where the building tells you what it is actually doing.
Predictive survey — modeled from the drawings
The model is built from your floor plans: wall construction and material, ceiling heights, the openings, the racking or shelving layout, then each candidate position is propagated through it.
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This is the right first step because it is the cheap place to be wrong — moving a position on a drawing costs nothing, moving a mounted access point costs a lift and a cable pull. What a model cannot know is what the building and its neighbours are transmitting today, which is why a predictive result is a starting design rather than a finished one.
On-site survey — measured in the building
An on-site walk measures instead of modeling: signal, noise and the interference no plan could have shown, taken on the floor with the racking, the machinery and the neighbouring tenants in place.
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On an existing network it separates coverage that has genuinely failed from coverage that is merely old. After an installation the same walk validates that what was mounted matches what was designed — the difference between a deployment that is finished and one that is only installed.
Passive and active measurement
Passive measurement listens: coverage, signal-to-noise, co-channel contention, what the adjacent buildings are putting into your channels. Active measurement connects a client and moves it: usable rate at the cell edge, roaming behaviour between positions, and how the design treats a device walking a corridor rather than standing in the middle of a room.
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Coverage problems appear in the first. Roaming problems only ever appear in the second.
Spectrum notes — the non-Wi-Fi half
Not everything transmitting in an unlicensed band is Wi-Fi, and none of it appears in a coverage model. Cordless and DECT handsets, video senders, some wireless sensors and industrial equipment with an RF component all occupy spectrum a heat map alone will never explain.
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Where a survey records an interferer it records where it stands, so the channel plan can route around a fixed source instead of the site relearning the same lesson every quarter.
Measure the building before you count the radios
Go to the formEverything downstream of the heat map
The first output is the obvious one: how many access points, of which model, with which antenna pattern, at which mounting height and orientation. Omnidirectional coverage from a nine-foot office ceiling and directional coverage from a thirty-foot warehouse roof are different products, not different settings, and the survey is where that choice is made rather than discovered.
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The second output is the wired layer, and it is usually the larger number. Every position on the placement plan is a switch port, a power class the closet has to carry, and — for any position without a drop already at it — a cable run with a pathway, a length limit and a labour line. A wireless design that ignores this reads as cheap right up to the moment the cabling quote arrives. We quote access points, access switching, power headroom, uplinks and the cabling as one document precisely so that number is never a surprise.
The third output is the sequence. Positions that need new drops set the schedule, because cable goes in before anything is mounted on it, and a phased rollout that ignores that ordering ends up sending the same crew to the same floor twice. The survey is what makes the schedule arguable on paper instead of on site.
What you actually receive
Survey deliverables are documents you own and can hand to anyone — including a different supplier. That is deliberate: a design nobody but us can read is not a deliverable, it is a lock-in.
Heat maps and the coverage model
Per band, with the thresholds stated on the drawing rather than implied by the colours — the signal level and signal-to-noise ratio the weakest device on your list has to see at the cell edge, and where primary and secondary coverage overlap for roaming.
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A map without its thresholds is decoration; a map with them is a pass-or-fail test the installation can be measured against later.
Access point placement and mounting plan
Positions on the floor plan with mounting height, orientation, antenna type and mount hardware named per position, and the cable drop each one needs marked as existing or new.
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This is the document the cabling scope is priced from and the one the install crew works to, which is why it carries part numbers rather than adjectives.
Channel, power and spectrum notes
A channel plan across the bands in use, transmit-power intent per position, band-planning notes where older client radios have to be carried, and any non-Wi-Fi source observed during the walk with its location.
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Where a legacy device class constrains the design, that constraint is written down rather than quietly designed around.
What's included in a Wi-Fi site survey
What the survey produces, and what is quoted beside it — the measurements first, then the equipment those measurements justify.
- A predictive model built from your floor plans — wall construction and material, ceiling heights, the openings and the racking or shelving layout
- On-site validation where the building or the device density warrants it, measuring signal, noise and the interference no plan could have shown
- Passive and active measurement across the bands in use — coverage, signal-to-noise and co-channel contention
- Spectrum notes on the non-Wi-Fi sources observed during the walk, which no coverage model contains
- Heat maps per band with the thresholds stated on the drawing rather than implied by the colours
- A placement and mounting plan — position, mounting height, orientation, antenna type and mount hardware per position, with each cable drop marked existing or new
- A channel plan, transmit-power intent per position, and band-planning notes where older client radios still have to be carried
From a floor plan to a screened order
There is no shelf price on a wireless design, and there is no honest access point count before somebody has looked at the building. This is the sequence a survey-led quote actually follows.
- Send the floor plans — dimensions, ceiling heights, wall construction where you know it, and any racking or shelving layout
- Write the requirement down: what has to connect, how many devices at peak, and the oldest radio that still has to work
- A Uniqcli specialist scopes the survey with you — predictive first, on-site validation where the building or the device density warrants it
- Heat maps, a placement and mounting plan, and a channel and power plan come back as documents you own
- Access points, switching, power headroom, cabling and the survey are quoted as separate readable lines rather than one bundled system price
- TAA (FAR 52.225-5) and NDAA §889 screening is performed on every line before the quote goes out; anything that fails is flagged with alternates
- GPC / P-Card accepted up to your cardholder threshold; purchase orders otherwise, with availability and the final total confirmed before you commit
The two failure modes a wireless site survey prevents
The first is under-deployment, and it is the one everybody expects: dead zones in the far corner, a stairwell where every call drops, a receiving desk that has to walk somewhere else to scan. It is discovered after the cabling crew has left, and the second visit — lift, drops, patching, another cutover window — routinely costs more than the survey that would have prevented it.
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The second is over-deployment, and it is the one that surprises people, because more access points can measurably make a network worse. Positions crowded into the same channels contend with each other, clients hold on to a distant radio instead of roaming to a near one, and the site has paid for the privilege. Density is a design decision with a wrong answer in both directions, which is the honest argument for measuring before buying.
There is a procurement argument too. A survey produces the one artefact that lets two suppliers' quotes be compared on the same basis — same positions, same thresholds, same cabling scope — instead of comparing two access point counts that were never derived the same way.
Send the floor plan and the device list
Those two things are enough to start. A Uniqcli specialist scopes the survey with you, and the design that comes back names positions, mounting, cabling and the switching underneath rather than an access point count on its own.
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Survey and hardware are quoted as separate lines, so you can commission the design without committing to the equipment in the same breath.
What a survey is not, and what stays yours
A survey is a design deliverable, not a guarantee. Coverage and throughput are properties of a building in use — of construction, of what is stored in it, of what the neighbours transmit and of how many devices are in the room on the busiest hour of the busiest day — and they are verified by measurement on the floor, never promised from a plan. We state thresholds and we test against them. We do not commit to a data rate at a position, and any supplier who does is quoting laboratory conditions.
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We also do not operate the network after handover. SSID and policy design decisions, day-to-day tuning, monitoring, security operations and the service commitments your users are held to stay with your team or the provider you contract. What we supply is the survey, the equipment, the licensing and the integration work that put the design into service, handed over documented.
And if your own designer, integrator or in-house team has already produced the RF design, we do not duplicate it. Send the placement plan or the model and part numbers it calls for, and we quote and source the stack it depends on instead — access points, access switching, power headroom, uplinks and cabling on one screened document.
What the survey feeds into
A survey is the front of a deployment rather than a product on its own. These are the lanes it normally hands off to.
Wi-Fi site survey questions
What is Wi-Fi heat mapping, exactly?
A heat map is a plan of the building shaded by a radio value — most often received signal, and in a design worth reading, signal-to-noise ratio as well, per band. It is only useful against a stated threshold: coverage means nothing until somebody writes down the signal level and the SNR the weakest device has to see at the edge of a cell. We set those thresholds with you first, which turns the map from a picture into a test the finished installation can be measured against.
Do we need an on-site survey, or is a predictive one enough?
It depends on how much the building is willing to tell you from a drawing. A new build or an empty shell with known construction is usually served well by a predictive design plus a validation walk after install. An occupied building with unknown wall construction, heavy racking, industrial equipment, a dense device count or close neighbours needs somebody on the floor with a meter, because those are precisely the variables a model has no way to see. We will say which one your site actually needs rather than selling the larger scope by default.
How long does a wireless site survey take?
It scales with floor area, with how many genuinely different environments sit inside it — office, warehouse, cold storage and yard are four surveys in one building — and with how much of the space we can actually reach during working hours. It is scoped per building before it is scheduled, and the schedule is agreed with your site rather than assumed, because access is usually the constraint rather than the work.
Can you survey a building that already has Wi-Fi?
Yes, and that is frequently the more valuable survey. It establishes where coverage has genuinely failed rather than where the equipment is simply old, which positions and cable drops can be reused, and which complaints are actually a client or roaming problem rather than a coverage one. The output is a phased plan you can fund, not an argument for replacing everything at once.
Does 6 GHz change how the survey is done?
It changes the arithmetic. There is far more spectrum and far less legacy congestion up there, but it does not propagate like 5 GHz for a given power level, so a design that assumes the same footprint per access point will leave gaps between them. Client support also still varies by device generation, so the band plan has to carry the older radios on your list at the same time. Whether a deployment runs as low-power indoor or standard power is a design input we ask about early rather than late.
Can the survey, the equipment and the installation go on one order?
Yes — one quote, with the survey, the hardware, the cabling and the installation as separate readable lines rather than a single system price. The survey is priced as its own deliverable on purpose: you keep the heat maps and the placement plan whether the equipment is bought now, later, or somewhere else entirely.
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Measure the building before you count the radios
Send the floor plans and the list of devices that have to work on the network. A Uniqcli specialist scopes the survey with you and returns heat maps, a placement and mounting plan and a channel plan — with the access points, switching, power headroom and cabling quoted as separate lines, screened and availability-stated.