Network & PoE Calculator.
Building parameters in, indicative switch count, Wi-Fi 7 access point density, PoE budget, Cat6A run count and project cost out. Sized to year-three load with 30% headroom.
- Sized to
- Year 3
- Headroom
- 30%
- Cabling
- Cat6A
- Wi-Fi
- Wi-Fi 7
— Switching · Wi-Fi · cabling · cost
Sized to year-three load.
Building parameters in, indicative switch count, Wi-Fi AP density, PoE budget, Cat6A run count and project cost out. Default headroom: 30% spare for year-three growth.
Concurrent users
800
1280 desk ports
Wi-Fi APs
6
Wi-Fi 6E (Aruba 530 / Catalyst 9120)
48-port switches
36
HPE Aruba 6100 / Cisco Catalyst 1000
PoE budget
0.6 kW
across all PoE devices
Cat6A drops
1755
incl. 30% spare
VLAN segments
6
with QoS classes
Indicative project cost
₹ 69.8 L
Commercial tier · HPE Aruba 6100 / Cisco Catalyst 1000
- HPE Aruba 6100 switches₹ 43.2 L
- Wi-Fi 6E (Aruba 530 / Catalyst 9120)₹ 2.1 L
- Cat6A cabling + terminations₹ 19.3 L
Indicative — tier scales with floor area and sector criticality. A small office gets SMB-grade switching; a hospital or 15,000+ m² estate scales to enterprise-grade. Includes switching, Wi-Fi, cabling, patch panels, racks; firewall and SD-WAN quoted separately.
· Example use
A 40,000 sq ft commercial office sized for 220 wired endpoints and 350 wireless devices lands on three 48-port PoE+ switches with two 10G uplinks, twelve Wi-Fi 7 access points, around 2.4 kW of PoE budget and 280 Cat6A runs. With 30 percent headroom factored in. The same office under-designed at year-one demand falls over by year three — and rewiring an occupied building is the most expensive mistake in low-voltage.
· Frequently asked
Network sizing —
what people ask first.
Why size to year-three with 30 percent headroom?
Networks rarely shrink. Headcount grows, devices multiply, and PoE-powered cameras, access readers and AV endpoints get added every year. Sizing to year-one demand without headroom forces a refresh inside the warranty period; sizing to year-three with headroom holds for the design life.
Wi-Fi 7 — is it really the right call today?
For new buildings, yes. The price gap to Wi-Fi 6E has closed, the 6 GHz band gives the cleanest spectrum we have ever had, and the access-point lifecycle is seven years minimum. Specifying Wi-Fi 6 today means a refresh in 2029. Wi-Fi 7 holds.
Cat6A or Cat7?
Cat6A. It is the workhorse standard, supports 10 Gbps to 100 metres, has a stable connector ecosystem and is half the price of Cat7. Cat7 has no meaningful field advantage in commercial buildings; Cat8 is data-centre territory only.
Which switch and AP brands?
Cisco Catalyst and Meraki for enterprise, Aruba for mixed estates, Ruckus for hospitality, Ubiquiti UniFi for premium residential and small commercial. PoE budgeting is identical across vendors; the choice is on management, warranty and lifecycle.
What about segmentation, VLANs and security?
Standard scope. Every project ships with a VLAN plan — corporate, guest, IoT, AV, ELV, BMS — and a layer-three policy at the core. Zero-trust micro-segmentation is an upgrade option, recommended for healthcare, finance and any building with sensitive data flows.
· Begin
Specifying a network
that has to hold for a decade?
Send the floor plates, the headcount, the device profile and the operating context. We will return a sized design and a defensible cost band within two working days.