Wi-Fi density engineering
capacity over coverage.

/ Engineering body

What this integration is and where it lives

Wi-Fi has moved from coverage engineering to capacity engineering. A modern boardroom may have 30 devices in a 50 m² room; a classroom may have 60 in 80 m²; a hotel lobby has unpredictable peaks. Designing for coverage gets the signal everywhere; designing for capacity admits each user 20-50 Mbps without contention. The two are different sciences. Capacity engineering counts clients per AP, allocates channels in a non-overlapping pattern, drops AP power to limit cell size, and adds APs not power to scale density. The interlocked specifications are AP count, channel plan, PoE budget and uplink capacity. Adding APs to scale density also scales PoE draw (Wi-Fi 7 APs typically draw 30-50 W with PoE++) and uplink bandwidth (each AP can push 4-9 Gbps under MLO). Spec a switch with PoE++ headroom and 10G uplinks per AP cluster, otherwise the AP density that solves the user-density problem creates a switch-capacity problem.