Network & PoE Calculator.
— Calculator · network & PoE
Sized to year-three load.
Building profile and floor area in — indicative AP count, switching, PoE pool and Cat6A drop count out, with 25% port headroom and 30% drop spare. A planning convention, not a heat-map survey.
Wi-Fi APs
27
Wi-Fi 6E (Aruba 530 / Catalyst 9120)
48-port switches
30
HPE Aruba 6100 / Cisco Catalyst 1300
PoE budget
1.2 kW
baseline pool · 25 W per AP
Cat6A drops
1,471
incl. 30% spare
A planning link that reopens this exact configuration — not a quote.
- users
- 800 concurrent · 1,040 desk ports
- poe endpoints
- 91
- wi-fi class
- Wi-Fi 6E (Aruba 530 / Catalyst 9120)
- switching
- HPE Aruba 6100 / Cisco Catalyst 1300
- vlans
- 6 segments with QoS classes
- users / m²
- 0.1 (planning convention)
- ap density
- 1 per 303 m² · Cisco / Aruba design guides
- ports / user
- 1.3 (planning convention)
- port headroom
- 25%
- drop spare
- 30%
- cabling
- ANSI/TIA-568 · ISO/IEC 11801 Cat6A
- governance
- BICSI N1 · design recommendations
- poe standard
- IEEE 802.3bt Type 3 / 4
- poe per ap
- 25 W baseline (Wi-Fi 6/6E class — Wi-Fi 7 draws ≈ 32 W)
- poe per camera
- 12 W (mixed fixed/dome)
+ Model assumptions (10)− Model assumptions
Indicative — AP density modelled against Cisco / Aruba design guides; user, port and PoE figures are planning conventions, not standard-mandated. Final design follows a coverage / capacity heat-map (Ekahau / iBwave), a site survey and consultant review, and verifies cable lengths against IEEE 802.3bt PSE-to-PD derating. Size the final PoE pool in the PoE Budget tool.
What changes this estimate
- Floor plates & riser locations
- Coverage / capacity heat-map (Ekahau / iBwave)
- Actual device schedule per space
- Chosen AP & camera models (PoE class)
A planning link that reopens this exact configuration — not a quote.
IT · Networking · PoE · BICSI N1 / ANSI/TIA-568 / IEEE 802.11be informed
Building parameters in, indicative switch count, Wi-Fi 7 access point density, PoE budget (watts), Cat6A run count and port/AP sizing out. AP density from Cisco / Aruba design guides, cabling aligned to BICSI N1 governance and ANSI/TIA-568 structured-cabling practice, PoE pooled at a 25 W-per-AP baseline — with 25% port headroom and 30% cable-drop spare as a planning convention.
- Sized to
- Year 3
- Headroom
- 30%
- Cabling
- Cat6A
- Wi-Fi
- Wi-Fi 7
· Starting configurations
Typology presets — pick a scenario, see the calculator.
Each preset opens a curated configuration page with the engineering reasoning behind the numbers. Then the calculator loads with the same inputs — change them and the URL stays shareable.
Network Calculator · Healthcare
Hospital block, 6,000 m2: 27 APs, 10-VLAN clinical split
Open presetNetwork Calculator · Hospitality
Hotel, 12,000 m2: 34 APs, IoT-heavy 8-VLAN fabric
Open presetNetwork Calculator · Corporate office
Corporate office, 5,000 m2: 17 APs, commercial-tier access layer
Open preset· Engineering advisory · Network & PoE Calculator
What the sizing answer means for the building.
Switch count and PoE budget are the visible outputs, but the four notes below frame what the sizing decision predicts about rack space, cable plant, lifecycle and the building's growth path.
Deployment observations
- Sizing to year-three demand with 30 percent headroom is the disciplined default for commercial buildings — but raise the headroom to 50 percent for healthcare and mission-critical campuses, where device-count growth is non-linear and each port is on the critical path.
- PoE budget at switch level must be specified at full-load worst-case (e.g. all cameras and APs simultaneously powered), not nominal — the calculator already sums every PoE device at its full per-device planning wattage, with no simultaneity discount. Verify with the actual PoE class table for the chosen camera and AP models before ordering switches.
- Wi-Fi 7 versus Wi-Fi 6E is a 5-7 year decision, not a today decision. The price gap to Wi-Fi 6E has closed; if the building is new construction with a 7-year refresh horizon, the answer is Wi-Fi 7 today. Retrofit decisions follow the existing cable plant's PoE capacity.
Redundancy posture
- 10G uplinks per access switch should be at least dual-pathed to the core for any building above 200 endpoints — single-uplink topologies have a single point of failure that takes a floor offline on switchport degradation. The marginal cost is one 10G port per switch.
Operational notes
- Stacked-switch configuration (3-4 PoE+ switches in a stack) is one logical entity for operations — single management plane, single configuration baseline, automatic failover. Specify stack-capable switches as the floor; the marginal price difference is paid back in the first MAC-address move-add-change.
- Cable-plant labelling against the architect's grid (room-system-cable_id) is the discipline that pays back at every device move. Without labelling, every change becomes a tracing exercise; with labelling, a typical office floor's move takes hours, not days.
Lifecycle implications
- Cat6A copper plant is a 20-year asset — three switch generations and two Wi-Fi generations ride the same cable. The cost of pulling Cat6A versus Cat6 at first install is 8-12 percent; the cost of rip-and-replace later is 4-6x the differential. Specify Cat6A as the floor.
- Switch refresh cadence is 7-9 years for enterprise (Cisco / Aruba / Juniper) versus 5-7 years for SMB (Ubiquiti / Netgear). The choice is set by the operations team's tolerance for management upgrade cycles, not by the day-one hardware tier.
· 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 within two working days; pricing follows a written estimate after review.