— Network Calculator · Corporate office
Corporate office, 5,000 m2: 17 APs, commercial-tier access layer
Problem. A 5,000 m2 corporate office floor plate has to carry staff laptops and handsets, Wi-Fi, desk phones, cameras and a light building-IoT estate on one access fabric. Before closets and containment are laid out, the team needs a defensible first-cut AP count, access-port count, PoE load and VLAN split sized from realistic office density rather than a guessed device list.
Answer. At office density the tool sizes 500 concurrent users, 17 Wi-Fi APs and 650 wired user ports; with 24 cameras and 60 IoT endpoints added, 751 total access ports land on 20 forty-eight-port switches and 977 Cat6A drops. The PoE endpoints draw about 1.1 kW, and because the office profile is non-critical and the area sits well below the enterprise boundary the tool settles on the commercial tier with 6 VLANs.
02 / In depth
How this preset reads — the engineering view.
The calculator sizes an enterprise LAN from a building-profile density rather than a hand-listed device count: users, APs and wired ports each scale off a per-m2 coefficient drawn from Cisco, Aruba and Juniper Mist high-density design guides. Those coefficients are design-guide conventions, not a code mandate - the office profile runs a moderate intensity between a sparse warehouse and a dense clinical floor.
For this 5,000 m2 office the model returns 500 concurrent users and 17 APs. Wired user ports come to 650, and the PoE endpoints - 17 APs, 24 cameras and 60 IoT devices - add 101 more, for 751 total access ports. Applying the port-headroom factor over 48-port switches gives 20 access switches, and the drop-headroom factor gives 977 Cat6A drops. The PoE budget works out to about 1.1 kW across the closets. With 6 VLANs the design separates corporate, voice, guest, CCTV and building-IoT traffic, and the non-critical profile on a sub-enterprise footprint puts it on the commercial tier.
The result moves monotonically with each input: raise the area or the users-per-m2 and APs, ports, drops and switch count all climb together; add cameras or IoT endpoints and the PoE port count, PoE watts and drop count rise in step. Increasing the VLAN count sharpens logical segmentation without changing the physical port maths, and pushing the area past the profile's enterprise boundary is what would step the tier up.
The figures are a provisioning envelope, not a rack elevation. The tool does not place closets, size fibre uplinks or inter-switch aggregation, model redundancy or dual-homing, or size the core and firewall; it also does not resolve guest-portal, voice or collaboration-platform integration. Treat the AP count as a coverage starting point to be confirmed by a predictive or on-site Wi-Fi survey, and take the final switch, AP and drop counts as subject to drawings, site conditions and consultant or client approval. Use the brief wizard or /contact to route a safe enquiry summary to TechnoGuru's networking and structured-cabling scope.
What this preset deliberately does not solve
- AP count is a density estimate - confirm with a predictive or on-site Wi-Fi survey.
- Access-layer only: no core, firewall, fibre-uplink or redundancy sizing.
- Guest-portal, voice and collaboration-platform integration are separate design steps the tool does not model.
How this preset differs from its siblings
The hospital preset runs the highest per-m2 intensity with a mission-critical flag that forces the enterprise tier, and the hotel preset is a large, IoT-dominated low-density footprint. This preset is the mid-density commercial-office case: moderate user density, a light camera and IoT estate and a non-critical profile that settles cleanly on the commercial tier. Use it as the baseline shape for a standard office floor plate before the clinical or hospitality extremes.
03 / Hydrated calculator
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— 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
17
Wi-Fi 6E (Aruba 530 / Catalyst 9120)
48-port switches
20
HPE Aruba 6100 / Cisco Catalyst 1300
PoE budget
1.1 kW
baseline pool · 25 W per AP
Cat6A drops
977
incl. 30% spare
A planning link that reopens this exact configuration — not a quote.
- users
- 500 concurrent · 650 desk ports
- poe endpoints
- 101
- 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.
· Other presets for network & poe calculator
Network Calculator · Healthcare
Hospital block, 6,000 m2: 27 APs, 10-VLAN clinical split
A 6,000 m2 hospital block has to carry clinical workstations, wandering staff on handhelds, guest Wi-Fi, networked medical devices and the BMS on one physical fabric — without any of those planes touching each other. The design team needs a defensible first-cut AP count, access-port count, PoE load and VLAN count before the closets and containment are laid out.
Network Calculator · Hospitality
Hotel, 12,000 m2: 34 APs, IoT-heavy 8-VLAN fabric
A 12,000 m2 hotel spreads guest Wi-Fi, back-of-house operations, a large room-automation estate (locks, thermostats, GRMS), CCTV and the PMS across a big, low-density floor plate. The team needs an honest access-layer envelope — AP count, port count, PoE load and VLAN split — that reflects a footprint dominated by IoT endpoints rather than by concurrent human users.
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