Connecticut and the boroughs of New York have given us a fair amount of practice working in buildings older than most of the people working in them. Plaster walls with chicken wire, steel-mesh elevator shafts, fish-tape conduits that haven't been opened since the 70s — every one of these chews Wi-Fi in a different way, and none of them show up on a paper floor plan.

Our standard pre-deployment now includes a physical site survey: we walk the space with a calibrated radio at the height a laptop actually sits, log signal-to-noise on a grid, and produce a heat map with the access points placed where the math (not the ceiling tile layout) wants them. It's a half day of work that saves us months of "the back conference room is bad."

The instinct in older buildings is always to throw more access points at the problem. The right answer is almost always fewer access points in better places, on the right channels, with the right power levels. It's also the cheaper answer, which we mention to clients before the quote, not after.

" The cheap thing is to buy more access points. The right thing is to put fewer access points in better places.

— Your Tech Department, November 2025