UniFi network designer

It starts where every real design starts: coverage. The square-footage band you pick carries a planning figure, and the designer divides it by a conservative per-access-point coverage area to get an indoor access-point count — then raises that count if you have more floors than access points, because radio does not travel through a concrete slab and a per-floor minimum is the cheapest way to stop a design being wrong on the top floor.

Everything that draws power over Ethernet is then added up: the access points, the cameras, the door hardware, plus a spare allowance for the wired drops a building always turns out to need — printers, desk ports, a display, a point-of-sale lane, the next thing. That total picks the switch class, and it picks it with headroom rather than exactly full. A switch with no free ports is a switch you replace the first time anything is added.

The gateway follows the scale of the site rather than a feature checkbox: a compact gateway where the floor area and the camera count are both small, a larger one once either of them grows, because a camera fleet and a bigger client population are the two things that actually move the requirement. Cameras add a recorder from the very first camera, and the recorder steps up once the camera count reaches nine. Controlled doors add a reader and a hub for each opening.

Ports are only half of what a switch has to supply. The designer also adds up the power the design's own devices will draw — each part's stated figure where the catalog prints one, a conservative allowance for the role where it does not — and prints that total beside the port count. A switch whose stated power budget is below it is skipped, however early it sits on the preference list, because a switch that cannot power the access points on the same page is not a cheaper option; it is the wrong one.

Then availability decides the model. For every role the designer walks a short preference list and takes the first part that is priced and in stock; if none is, it takes the first that is priced and orderable on a lead time, and shows you honestly that it is back-ordered; if the catalog holds the part but no price, the line is marked for pricing instead of being given a number. If a role cannot be filled at all today, it still appears — as a line that says it is quoted with your design. Nothing a design needs is silently left out.

Square footage is a proxy for coverage, not a measurement of it. Wall construction, ceiling height, racking, glass, lift shafts and the number of people using the network at once all move access-point placement in ways no calculator reaches. Treat the count as a starting point and let a floor plan or a walk-through settle the positions — that is the single biggest accuracy gain available on any wireless design.

Cabling and pathway are usually the largest variable in the whole project and none of it can be derived from a device list: existing conduit versus a new run, the distance from the comms cupboard to the far corner, whether the ceiling is accessible, and where the rack or wall enclosure is going to live. Camera retention is the second: how many days of footage you must keep sets the recorder's storage, which is why the designer names drives as a separate quoted item rather than guessing a capacity.

The internet service itself is a separate conversation from the equipment behind it. A gateway terminates a circuit; it does not provide one. Where a site needs the circuit as well as the equipment, that is scoped alongside it rather than assumed.

Where being offline costs more than the hardware does, the same conversation covers a second path: a backup circuit from a different carrier, or a cellular connection that carries the site while the primary is down. The high-availability option in the designer sizes the equipment side of that — the appliance that terminates the cellular path, and the powered port and gateway class it implies. The path itself stays a service: a circuit is a carrier contract and a cellular backup needs its own data plan and SIM, so both are quoted alongside the equipment rather than assumed to come with it.

Uniqcli quotes the whole package rather than the box: hardware, software licensing and subscriptions, and the deployment and lifecycle services around them, sourced through our distribution network. Where a build needs configuring, imaging, integrating or making to spec, that is quoted on the same document rather than left as someone else's problem.

Sourcing through authorized US distribution rather than a manufacturer relationship is the reason this tool is useful rather than promotional: the requirement picks the line, not the other way round. Where an installed base, an existing controller or a standard your organization already follows constrains the choice, that constraint leads. Where it does not, we shortlist on coverage, capacity and total cost over the life of the system, and we will say plainly when a different manufacturer is the better answer.

TAA (FAR 52.225-5) and NDAA §889 screening is performed on every order — country of origin recorded per line, covered-entity checks performed before the quote goes out. That is a screening service we run, on the specific parts you are buying, at the time you buy them; it is never a blanket certification asserted about a product in advance.

What comes back is a quote document with the hardware, the licensing and the services as readable lines rather than one bundled figure. Send the design from this page, a floor plan, or a bill of materials, and we price against that — including the lines this tool marks for pricing and the roles it hands over to be quoted.