Planner › Guides › Hotel Wi-Fi planning
Hotel Wi-Fi planning: reaching every guest room
Last updated: October 9, 2026.
Hotels are hard because guest rooms sit behind concrete or masonry walls. Corridor access points alone often leave weak signal inside rooms.
What matters in a hotel
- Model every room wall as concrete or brick, not drywall.
- Compare corridor placement with in-room or wall-plate access points.
- Lobbies and meeting spaces need capacity, not only coverage.
Settings to try in the planner
- Environment: High attenuation.
- Draw room walls as Concrete (10 dB) or Brick (6 dB).
- Minimum RSSI: -67 dBm for general guest use.
- Mounting height: match your ceiling, typically 2.7 m.
Worked example with the planner's numbers
Take a ceiling access point at 20 dBm EIRP on 5 GHz, the planner's 8 dB link margin, a path-loss exponent of 3.1 and a target of -67 dBm. In open space the signal stays above the target for about 10.7 m. Walls then cut that reach (the planner scales wall loss by 1.2 at 5 GHz):
| Path | Reach at -67 dBm | Share of open-space reach |
|---|---|---|
| Open space | 10.7 m | 100% |
| Through a brick room wall (6 dB) | 6.3 m | 59% |
| Through a concrete room wall (10 dB) | 4.4 m | 41% |
That is why corridor access points alone rarely reach into guest rooms: the reach through one concrete wall is a small fraction of the open-space reach. These are model values for planning; confirm them with an on-site survey.
Upload your floor plan and try it free: Open the Wi-Fi heatmap planner
Forecasts are planning estimates. Validate with an on-site survey before buying or installing equipment. See also the AP placement guide, the RSSI guide and planner pages by brand.
← Back to the planner · Guides · All brands · AP placement guide · RSSI guide · About · Methodology