Wireless Access Points — Wi-Fi 6 & Wi-Fi 7 Coverage

Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) adds 320 MHz channels, 4K-QAM modulation, and Multi-Link Operation, which lets a client use two bands at once instead of picking one. On paper that roughly doubles headline throughput over Wi-Fi 6.

In practice the gain depends on what your clients support. An office fleet of Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6 laptops sees better airtime efficiency from a Wi-Fi 7 AP but not the headline speed, because MLO and 320 MHz need a Wi-Fi 7 client at the other end.

The 6 GHz question is now settled in India. The lower 6 GHz band, 5925–6425 MHz, was exempted from licensing for low-power indoor wireless access under rules notified by the Ministry of Communications in January 2026 — so tri-band 6 GHz equipment such as the L7Pro is deployable indoors here rather than being a feature you pay for and cannot switch on.

A coverage survey shows where signal reaches. It does not show how many devices can be served at once, and that is what users experience as 'the Wi-Fi is slow'. Airtime is the shared resource: one distant client negotiating a low data rate holds the channel longer and slows everyone on that radio.

Count concurrent devices per area and divide by 30–50 per AP. Then check the shape of the space rather than its size — a 200-seat hall and a 200-seat open office need different AP counts because of how bodies and partitions absorb 5 GHz.

Two things flow downstream from an AP choice: how much PoE the closet switch must supply, and how fast the port behind each AP has to be. Both are regularly discovered after the switch has been quoted.

An AP whose radios can exceed a gigabit needs a multi-gigabit access port, or the switch becomes the ceiling. The L7Pro backhauls at 2.5GbE with a 10G SFP+ option; L7, L7Lite, L7-W and L7-T backhaul at 2.5GbE; the Wi-Fi 6 models backhaul at 1GbE, which matches their radios.

The housing is a coverage decision, not a cosmetic one. A ceiling AP radiates downward across rooms; a wall-plate unit serves the room it is in and the corridor outside it; an outdoor unit uses directional antennas to throw coverage across open ground.

Ingress protection is the other half. IP65 resists dust and low-pressure water jets, which covers walls, gates and covered yards. IP68 adds sustained immersion resistance for fully exposed mounts. An indoor AP in a weatherproof box is not an outdoor AP — it overheats and the antennas detune.

2.4 GHz has three non-overlapping channels in India — 1, 6 and 11. Any plan that uses others guarantees adjacent-channel interference, and no amount of transmit power fixes it. Treat 2.4 GHz as the compatibility band for older and IoT devices, and steer everything capable onto 5 GHz or 6 GHz.

5 GHz offers far more channels, but a block of them is DFS: the AP must monitor for radar and vacate the channel if it detects any. That is fine in most buildings and worth avoiding near airports and defence installations, where radar events force clients off the channel mid-session.

6 GHz, now delicensed for low-power indoor use, is the cleanest spectrum available because only Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 clients can reach it. Its range is shorter than 5 GHz at the same power, so it rewards denser AP placement rather than replacing the 5 GHz plan.