THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO WI-FI IN RETAIL

Retail Wi-Fi: Gathering Your Requirements

The first step of any wireless project is to understand the requirements (what the network needs to do) and the constraints (what the design needs to work around). Without those two things clear in everyone’s mind you will likely end up with a solution that will ruin the customer experience and damage your brand.

Ultimately the main objective of your project is liekly to help the bottom line by enabling staff in your stores, warehouses and distribution centres to work more effectively. You will almost certainly also be deploying guest Wi-Fi in your stores in order to drive sales by providing a great customer experience to promote brand loyalty and repeat business.

In each situation make sure you remember to put your stakeholders requirements at the centre of all your Wi-Fi design decisions.

Retail Wi-Fi: Choosing an Access Point

Your WLAN design will fail at the first hurdle if you don’t pick the right Access Point (AP) for the job. This is why it’s important to fully understand your network requirements and design constraints before selecting an AP model to design around.

Unfortunately, most Wireless Internet service providers (WISPs) tend to pick the AP vendor and models that they are most comfortable with, not necessarily the ones most suitable to the application. Important things to consider when selecting an AP are;

Budget

If you pick the cheapest possible hardware it will most likely buckle during peak hours when the density of clients is highest. On the other hand, large enterprise APs could be overkill, incurring additional up-front investment, and higher ongoing licensing costs for features that are never going to be used in practice.

Future Proofing

Most AP deployments have a typical expected lifespan of 3-5 years. Therefore, it should be the future requirements, not today’s, which drive the selection of your access points.

Aesthetics

Generally, aesthetic constraints will dictate the selection of an indoor AP with internal antennas, especially in high end stores. External antennas, however, offer additional flexibility for mounting, along with the ability to add 3rd party antennas with particular profiles for custom applications.

Access Point Performance

In high-density areas look for access points with MU-MIMO as this allows the AP to simultaneously communicate with multiple clients in the same environment (for client devices that support the technology). This gives you a denser utilization of the channel, thus increasing total potential channel capacity and throughput per client device. The more spatial streams per radio the higher the maximum data rate.

Architecture

Controllers have a heavy hardware approach, which make growth difficult and upgrades even harder. Cloud-managed Wi-Fi reduces the manpower required to maintain a controller-based architecture, and also makes it easier to manage. If you are responsible for a very large campus, or multiple campuses it’s likely you will want a cloud-based architecture to provide centralized visibility and control.

Infrastructure

New or refurbished buildings tend to present the opportunity to get the latest wiring and switches, however if you are upgrading APs in an existing building the current infrastructure can have a large influence on which APs you can use. For example, you will need to check if existing Ethernet switches support the model/s of access point and their Power over Ethernet (PoE) requirements.

Security

Security and segregation will be another primary concern with sensitive corporate and customer data traversing the network. Some APs come equipped with a third radio, which is used as a dedicated security sensor for 24x7x365 scanning and automated over-the-air (OTA) prevention.

BLE

You might also want to look for APs with integrated Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radios if you want to use customer wayfinding, an increasingly common feature in large shopping centres.