Cisco Meraki WiFi surveys, design and installation
Meraki is a strong platform badly served by the assumption that it configures itself. It will manage the radios you give it — it cannot tell you how many to buy or where to put them.
What Meraki is genuinely good at
Meraki's real advantage is operational rather than radio-frequency. The dashboard gives an IT team one view of every site, every access point and every client, with per-client history, application visibility and alerting that works without anyone building it. For an organisation with six buildings and two people looking after them, that is worth real money.
The hardware is sound, the firmware update path is unusually painless, and the configuration model is consistent enough that a change made at one site can be pushed to twenty. If you are running a multi-site estate and your constraint is people rather than capital, Meraki is frequently the right answer.
It is also a platform whose weaknesses are predictable, which makes it easy to design around — provided you design at all.
Where Meraki deployments go wrong
Trusting Auto RF to fix a placement problem
Meraki's automatic channel and power management is competent. It is also strictly limited to the access points it has been given, in the positions somebody chose. If an access point is above a plasterboard ceiling in a corridor when the density is in the open-plan floor beside it, no amount of automatic tuning will move it. Auto RF turns radios down; it does not relocate them, and it cannot invent one where there is a hole.
Counting access points from floor area
The most common Meraki quotation we see is one access point per so many square metres. That is a coverage calculation, and coverage is rarely the binding constraint in a modern building — capacity is. Thirty people on video calls in one corner is a different problem from thirty people spread across a floor, and floor area cannot tell them apart. A survey can.
Licensing surprises
Meraki access points require a current licence to function. This is not a support contract that lapses quietly — the hardware stops passing traffic. Whether you are on per-device or co-termination licensing changes what a renewal looks like and what happens when you add access points mid-term. Both are manageable; neither is optional, and both belong in the business case at the start rather than in year three.
Assuming the cabling will be fine
Meraki access points want the PoE budget and the cable performance the datasheet says they want. A Wi-Fi 6 or 6E access point on a tired Cat5e run, fed from a switch whose PoE budget is already committed, will underperform in ways that look exactly like an RF problem and waste a fortnight of diagnosis. We do the cabling ourselves precisely so that this stops being an argument between two suppliers.
How we survey for a Meraki design
The survey does not change because the platform is Meraki — the physics is the same. What changes is what we hand over at the end.
- Predictive model or on-site measurement, or both, depending on whether the building exists yet. Predictive · On site
- An access point count and positions marked on a scaled plan, with mounting type stated for each — ceiling tile, soffit, wall, or high-level bracket with the access equipment noted
- Model selection against the measurement rather than against a price list: indoor versus ruggedised, internal versus external antenna, and whether any position genuinely justifies a directional antenna
- A channel plan and power levels to seed the RF profile with, so the dashboard starts from measured reality instead of discovering your neighbours live
- SSID and band guidance — how many SSIDs the airtime budget will actually stand, and where band steering helps rather than hurts
- A validation survey after commissioning, measured against the design and handed over as evidence. More on validation
The report is written to be tendered. If you want to buy the Meraki hardware through your existing supplier and have us do the survey, design and installation, that works and we will say so in writing.
Migrating to or from Meraki
Two migrations come up repeatedly, and both are more about sequencing than about radio.
On-premises controller to Meraki. The temptation is a like-for-like swap: same positions, same count, new boxes. That inherits every mistake in the original design, and it is why so many migrations end with the same complaints on newer hardware. A survey of the existing network first tells you which positions were right, which were wrong, and how many access points you actually need — which frequently reduces the count and pays for the survey.
Meraki to something else, usually driven by a licence renewal that has become hard to justify. The engineering question is whether the existing cabling and mounting positions suit the replacement platform's antenna behaviour; often they do, sometimes they emphatically do not, and a survey is what tells you before you commit.
In both cases we can run the old and new networks in parallel on separate SSIDs while devices are moved across, so there is no single evening on which everything has to work.
SEGwifi is an independent Wi-Fi surveyor, designer and installer. Product names are the trade marks of their respective owners and are used here only to describe the equipment we survey, design and install. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting as an agent for any of them.
Common questions
Do I need a survey if Meraki tunes itself?
Yes, because the two things solve different problems. Meraki's automatic RF management chooses channels and power for the access points it has. A survey decides how many access points there should be, where they go, what they are mounted on and what they are cabled with. Automation cannot move an access point or add a missing one.
Can you do a Meraki site survey if we buy the hardware elsewhere?
Yes. The survey and design are sold on their own and the report is written so that any competent installer can build from it. Plenty of clients tender the installation after commissioning the survey from us.
Which Meraki access points do you specify?
Whichever the measurements justify. The choice turns on density, ceiling height, mounting position, whether the location is indoor or exposed, and whether 6 GHz is useful in that building given the client devices actually in use — Wi-Fi 6E and 7 in practice. We name the model in the report with the reasoning next to it, so it can be challenged.
What happens when the licence expires?
Meraki access points stop passing traffic without a current licence — this is a design characteristic of the platform, not a support lapse. We flag the renewal profile at design stage so the whole-life cost is visible before the platform is chosen rather than after.
Is Meraki better than UniFi?
Not universally, and anyone who says so is selling one of them. Meraki costs more and gives a multi-site team far better visibility and control. UniFi costs far less per access point with no recurring licence and is genuinely capable in a well-designed single site. The building and the estate decide it.
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.