Ask the spec sheet how many access points an office needs and the answer is one. A UniFi U7 Pro is good for "300+" clients, a TP-Link EAP650 for "250+", a Grandstream GWN7660 for "500+", and seventy people with a laptop and a phone each come to 140 devices. One box, with room to spare.
Cisco Meraki's high-density design guide plans a busy space at about 25 clients per radio, or 50 per access point. We read the printed client figure on 40 current access points from UniFi, TP-Link Omada and Grandstream, each from the vendor's own spec page or datasheet, and set it against that. The printed ceilings run from 200 to 1,020, median 300, which is 4 to 20 times the planning figure. When CloudSpinx designs office Wi-Fi and the network under it in Kenya, the access point count comes from a survey of the floor and the people on it, and the client number on the box never enters the sum.
What the client number on the box counts
TP-Link says it in a footnote under the EAP650's 250+: "The actual capacity depends on the wireless environment and client traffic and is generally less than the maximum number of client connections." The figure counts connections. It is how many devices the access point can keep connected, not how many get a usable share of the air.
The share is the part that runs out. Wi-Fi is half duplex, and Meraki's guide puts it plainly: "only one device can talk at a time while the other devices connected to the same AP wait." Every phone that joins takes turns with every laptop on the same radio, and 300 devices taking turns is a queue.
Three more things in the data say the number was not written for planning. Thirty-six of the 40 figures end in a plus sign, so even as a ceiling it is open-ended. Two TP-Link models sold under the same AX1800 rating, the EAP610 and the EAP620 HD, print 250+ and 1,020+. And the same UniFi and Omada pages print the area one access point covers, 115 to 200 m². Put the printed client count into the printed area and each device gets 0.14 to 0.74 m² of floor, median 0.47 m². At a laptop and a phone a head, the median model's two printed figures put one person on every 0.93 m².
How many clients per access point to plan for
Plan for about 25 clients per radio, or 50 per access point. That is Meraki's figure for high-density deployments, and TP-Link lands near it on its own support site: in its troubleshooting guide for Omada access points it recommends fewer than 25 clients on a single-band EAP and fewer than 60 on a dual-band one. The same company prints 250+ to 1,020+ on the product pages. Grandstream's FAQ calls its per-model figures "maximum design limits" and says real usable clients "depend on environment and traffic". We found no planning figure in Ubiquiti's help center, only the ceiling on each spec page.
Two details change the arithmetic. The 25 is per radio, and on a dual-band access point the 5 GHz radio carries most of the load: Meraki's common design split is 30% of clients on 2.4 GHz and 70% on 5 GHz, so the 5 GHz count is the one to divide. And count phones. A phone joined to the office network is a client whether anyone is looking at it or not.
How many access points do I need? Take the largest of three counts
Meraki's method takes the larger of two counts, one by clients and one by throughput, each rounded to the nearest whole access point. Add a coverage count from the spec sheet and you have three numbers. The office needs whichever is highest.
Take an example office: a 400 m² open floor, 70 people, a laptop and a phone each, and at the busiest hour 25 of them in video meetings at once.
- Coverage. 400 m² divided by the 140 m² the U7 Pro and EAP650 pages print is 2.9, so 3. TP-Link's footnote says its figure comes from laboratory testing and that "Actual coverage is not guaranteed", and walls push the count up, which is why the survey comes before the quote rather than after.
- Clients. 140 devices, 70% on 5 GHz, is 98. At 25 per radio that is 3.9, so 4.
- Calls. Microsoft's Teams network guidance recommends 2.5 Mbps up and 4 Mbps down per endpoint in a video meeting. On half-duplex Wi-Fi both directions share the air, so that is 6.5 Mbps a call and 162.5 Mbps for 25. Meraki estimates about 101 Mbps of real throughput for a two-stream Wi-Fi 6 laptop on a 20 MHz channel: 1.6, so 2.
The office needs 4. The box said 1. Clients decided this one. A floor broken up by block walls can hand the decision to coverage, and a room where most devices are laptops in the same meeting hands it to calls, because 25 laptops on one radio at 6.5 Mbps each want 162.5 Mbps of a channel that gives about 101.
Those 25 meetings also want 100 Mbps down and 62.5 up from the internet line, before anyone opens a browser. Check that against the line before blaming the access points, and if calls only drop when the office switches to its backup line, that is what failover does to the traffic already running, not the Wi-Fi.
Want these counts on your own floor? Send the floor area or plan, the headcount, devices per person and how many people are in meetings at the busiest hour through the network scoping form or on WhatsApp at +254 713 403 044, and you get all three back with the one that binds, before any survey.
What a Wi-Fi quote should show you
An installer who counted properly can show the working. Ask for three things:
- The device count for each area, and the clients per radio it was divided by.
- A survey or predicted coverage map on your own floor plan, naming the access point model and the signal level it was drawn to.
- The channel width on 5 GHz. Meraki's arithmetic runs at 20 MHz, its common recommendation for dense spaces, because bonding channels into wider ones leaves fewer to share between neighboring access points.
A count with no device number behind it was sized for something other than the clients: coverage alone, floor area or the box. Access points bunched around reception, because that is where the installer started, are the dead zone pattern: more boxes, no better signal in the meeting rooms. Reading a headline figure as capacity is also what goes wrong in firewall sizing from the datasheet, and the fix is the same: find the second number.
Where the box number still holds
Take fifteen people, each with a Wi-Fi 6 laptop and a phone, in one open room of up to 140 m², on a Wi-Fi 6 or 7 access point that prints 140 m², such as the EAP650 or the U7 Pro. Thirty devices is 21 on 5 GHz, under one radio's 25. Fifteen meetings at once is 97.5 Mbps, inside the 101. The room sits inside the 140 m² both pages print. Every count comes out at one, so buying on the box number does no harm there. We would still fit two on a decent business router, so the room keeps Wi-Fi when one dies, and we would not quote that office a managed switch stack or a next-generation firewall.
Above that, or for a floor where the Wi-Fi already struggles at the busy hour, choose "WiFi only" or "Cabling and WiFi" on the scoping form, pick the building type, and put the floor area, headcount, devices per person and meetings at the busiest hour in "What do you need?". Send the floor plan on WhatsApp at +254 713 403 044. You get the three counts worked on your numbers, the one that binds and the access point count it gives before a survey, which is the minimum to hold any quote against. Hardware is passed through at supplier cost, and if we look after the network once it is in, monitoring and firmware updates are billed as one monthly figure. Checking the numbers is free and commits you to nothing.