The Wi-Fi plan answers the question you only ask once the cables are in: will I still have signal over here? You draw your floor, place access points and see how strong the signal is in each spot, and on which band.
Where it sits
The plan is the third view of a site, next to the list and the network board. Above the floor plan sit the tools: select, room, wall, door or window, obstacle and access point. Under each tool is a line telling you what to do with it.
The floor plan
Start with a room, which is a rectangle with four walls of the chosen material, or draw separate walls yourself. A wall has a material and a thickness in centimetres, because plasterboard and concrete do very different things to a signal. You can pick plasterboard, wood, aerated concrete, brick, tiled wall, glass, coated low-e glass, concrete, reinforced concrete and metal, among others. The panel for a wall says what it costs in signal: 8 dB at 2.4 GHz, 12 dB at 5 GHz and 15 dB at 6 GHz for brick, for instance, and more as you make it thicker.
Walls can sit at any angle: drag an end and it snaps to 15 degree steps and to existing wall ends, hold Shift to keep the direction. Drag the wall itself and joining walls and rooms follow. You can put an opening anywhere in a wall: a wooden door, a passage without a door, a window, or a coated window. That last one is not a detail, because low-e glass stops nearly as much as a concrete wall.
You can also place obstacles that are there in real life: a meter cupboard, a fridge, a metal cabinet, a fish tank, a bookcase, a mirror, a radiator or a boiler. For the meter cupboard you say how much cabling is in it and whether the door is metal; both count. People and pets can go down too, because they are mostly water. Those stand still by default.
Floors
You can add several floors, each with a name and a height. Per floor you say what kind of floor sits under it: wood, a hollow-core slab, concrete, or concrete with underfloor heating. That matters, because an access point on the ground floor has to get through it to mean anything upstairs, and a heated concrete floor easily costs more than a wall.
Access points
Place an access point and pick a model from the catalogue; the bands and the transmit power come from there. A model you add here is added to the site as well, so it shows up on the network board and gets a script. If you only want to try out a spot, or you have another brand, pick a planning AP: it counts in the calculation but does not become a device and gets no script.
Per access point you can:
- set the mounting height;
- switch radios on or off per band, for example 5 GHz only in a spot where 2.4 GHz would only add noise. That changes the plan only, not the generated script;
- choose between an omnidirectional and a sector antenna, with a beam width, a direction you can turn, and how much weaker the signal is behind the antenna. Those are estimates, not factory data;
- read and adjust the EIRP per band. Leave it empty and the legal indoor maximum in the EU is used; if you set the access point itself lower, enter that here too.
Double-click an access point to jump to the network board with that device selected, so you can adjust its configuration right away.
Seeing the coverage
The map colours the signal per spot for the band you choose, through the walls, obstacles and floors you drew. The legend runs from excellent, through good enough for calls and video, fair and weak, to bad. Per room it says what percentage has good signal, what the average is in dBm and where the weakest spot is. That shows where an access point is too far away, where a gap falls behind a concrete wall, and where two access points overlap.
This is an estimate based on distance, walls, obstacles and floors. Real walls and real furnishing differ. Always measure after installing.
Moving interference
Switch on Jaclaz mode and the people and pets start walking. The signal changes with them, which shows why a measurement at one moment is not the whole story. The position you put them in yourself is kept, so your plan does not get scrambled by it.
Saving and sharing
A plan belongs to your project and is kept in your browser. You can export it as a file, as text for a forum post, or as a link. Only floors, walls, obstacles and access points travel with it, with their model, power and antenna: no device settings and no passwords. Whoever opens a shared link gets the plan as a new project, and on import the access points from the plan are added as new devices. For a large plan the link gets very long; use the file or the text then. See Saving and sharing.
Further reading: Channels, width and power and Checks about Wi-Fi.