— Network Calculator · Healthcare
Hospital block, 6,000 m2: 27 APs, 10-VLAN clinical split
Problem. 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.
Answer. At healthcare density the tool sizes 480 concurrent users, 27 Wi-Fi APs and 768 wired user ports, so 955 total access ports land on 25 forty-eight-port access switches feeding a 1,242-drop Cat6A field. The PoE endpoints (27 APs, 40 cameras, 120 clinical IoT) draw about 1.9 kW, and because healthcare is flagged mission-critical the design is pinned to the enterprise tier regardless of floor area.
02 / In depth
How this preset reads — the engineering view.
The calculator sizes an enterprise LAN from a building-profile density rather than a guessed device list: 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 healthcare profile simply runs richer numbers (0.08 users/m2, 0.0045 APs/m2, 1.6 ports/user) than a general office, because bedside carts, mobile nursing devices and dense clinical Wi-Fi push both coverage and wired provisioning up.
For this 6,000 m2 block the model returns 480 concurrent users and 27 APs (6,000 x 0.0045 = 27). Wired user ports come to 768 (480 x 1.6), and the PoE endpoints — 27 APs, 40 cameras and 120 clinical IoT devices — add 187 more, for 955 total access ports. Applying the 1.25 port-headroom factor and dividing by 48 yields 25 forty-eight-port access switches, and a 1.30 drop-headroom factor gives 1,242 Cat6A drops. The PoE budget is 27 x 25 W + 40 x 12 W + 120 x 6 W, about 1,875 W — roughly 1.9 kW across the closets. Because the healthcare profile is mission-critical, the tool selects the enterprise tier and asks for 10 VLANs to separate clinical, guest, medical-device, CCTV and BMS traffic.
The result moves monotonically with each input: raise the area or the users/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 staying on the mission-critical profile is what holds the design at the enterprise tier even where a smaller commercial fabric could carry the raw traffic.
The figures are a provisioning envelope, not a rack elevation. The tool does not place closets, compute fibre-uplink or inter-switch aggregation, model redundancy or dual-homing, or size the core and firewall; it also does not resolve clinical-network accreditation, medical-device isolation policy or air-gap requirements, which are set by the estate and its clinical-engineering team. Treat the AP count as a coverage starting point to be confirmed by a predictive or on-site Wi-Fi survey.
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.
- Medical-device isolation and clinical-network accreditation are policy decisions the tool does not model.
How this preset differs from its siblings
This healthcare preset runs the highest per-m2 intensity in the tool — more APs, more ports per user and a mission-critical flag that forces the enterprise tier on a compact 6,000 m2 footprint. The hotel preset is the opposite shape: a far larger 12,000 m2 area at lower per-m2 density, IoT-dominated and non-critical, so it settles on the commercial tier. Reach for this preset when clinical density and hard segmentation drive the design; use the hotel preset when a big footprint with light user density and heavy IoT does.
03 / Hydrated calculator
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