Ekahau Wi-Fi surveys
Ekahau is the toolset this industry designs and validates against. We use it for predictive design, on-site measurement and post-installation validation — and the surveyors running it are certified to.
Why the tooling matters
Anyone can open a phone app and photograph some signal bars. It will tell you what one radio, held at chest height, sees in one direction, at one moment. It won't tell you the noise floor, what the retry rate is doing, which channels your neighbours are sitting on, whether a handheld scanner will roam cleanly down an aisle, or how the network behaves when three hundred people connect at once.
Survey-grade tooling does. Our surveys run on Ekahau Sidekick with Ekahau Site Survey Pro, using a real access point as the reference rather than a modelled one. Together they combine calibrated measurement, spectrum analysis and a scaled model of your building, so every reading lands in the right place on the drawing and every plot means something specific. It is the difference between "the signal seems alright over there" and "−63 dBm with a signal-to-noise ratio of 31 dB on channel 44, measured two metres from the racking".
That precision is not academic. It is what makes a report tenderable, what lets an installer build without ringing you, and what makes a coverage guarantee something we can actually stand behind.
What we use it for
Predictive design
Before a building exists — or before anything is bought — we model it from your architectural drawings and a wall-material schedule. Different materials attenuate very differently: plasterboard is nearly transparent, dense blockwork is not, and a lift shaft or a cold store is effectively a wall you cannot see through. The model produces an access point count and layout you can budget from. More on predictive surveys.
On-site measurement
In an existing building we walk it and measure it, with the walls as built, the racking as loaded and the neighbouring networks as they really are. Modelled attenuation is an estimate; measured attenuation is a fact. More on on-site surveys.
Post-installation validation
After the access points are in and commissioned, we survey it again and compare the result against the design. That comparison is the evidence — and it is what our coverage guarantee is measured against. More on validation surveys.
Troubleshooting
For a network that already exists and underperforms, the same tooling is used diagnostically: find the interference, find the co-channel contention, find the coverage hole, and prove what's causing it before anyone spends money. More on troubleshooting.
What it measures
- Signal strength (RSSI) across every area, at the levels your specific devices need rather than a single generous threshold
- Signal-to-noise ratio — the number that actually predicts whether a connection is usable, and the one most cheap surveys ignore
- Co-channel and adjacent-channel interference, including your own access points competing with each other
- Non-Wi-Fi interference through spectrum analysis — the sources that don't show up as networks at all
- Channel utilisation, so capacity problems can be separated from coverage problems
- Data rates and retry rates, which is where a network that looks fine on paper gives itself away
- Roaming behaviour — whether a device moving through the building hands over cleanly or clings to a distant access point until the session drops
Who runs the survey
Tooling is only half of it. A survey is worth what the surveyor's judgement is worth: knowing that the reading behind the racking matters more than the one in the aisle, that a scanner fleet needs a different design target to a laptop fleet, and that a coverage hole in a stairwell is only a problem if somebody uses it.
Common questions
Is an Ekahau survey different from a normal Wi-Fi survey?
It's a Wi-Fi survey run properly. Ekahau is the industry-standard platform for wireless design and validation, so 'Ekahau survey' has become shorthand for a survey done with calibrated, survey-grade tooling rather than a laptop's built-in radio or a phone app. The methodology matters more than the brand name, but the brand name is what buyers search for — and it's what we use.
Do we need to own Ekahau ourselves?
No. The tooling, the licences and the certified surveyor are all ours. You get the outputs: the plots, the design, the report and the underlying survey data if you want it for your own records.
Can you validate work another contractor installed?
Yes, and we're asked to fairly often. We survey the installed network against whatever design or specification it was supposed to meet and report factually on where it does and doesn't. We'll tell you what it would take to bring it up to standard — and if the honest answer is that it's fine, that's what the report will say.
Will you give us the raw survey files?
Yes, on request. Some clients want them for their own records or to hand to a future supplier. We'd rather you had them than felt locked in — the report should win the next job, not the file format.
Do you survey for Wi-Fi 6, 6E and 7?
Yes. The newer standards change the design meaningfully — 6 GHz has far more spectrum but significantly shorter range and much less tolerance of walls, so a 6E or Wi-Fi 7 design usually needs more access points than the equivalent 5 GHz design, not fewer. That's exactly the sort of thing a survey exists to establish before you commit to a hardware refresh.
Let's find out what your Wi-Fi is actually doing.
Book a survey and you get measured data, a design you can build to, and a number you can budget against — not an opinion.