Design ·
How should WiFi be designed for a care home?
The principles behind reliable care home WiFi: coverage into every room, capacity for real device numbers, roaming, segmentation and a resilient connection.
Care homes are unusually demanding buildings for WiFi. They combine many small rooms with heavy fire doors, a large and growing number of devices, people who move around constantly, and systems that simply can’t fail. A design that would be fine for an office often isn’t good enough.
These are the principles we design to.
Design for the room, not the corridor
Putting access points in corridors keeps cabling simple, but signal has to pass through walls and closed fire doors to reach residents’ rooms — exactly where monitoring sensors, nurse-call devices and residents’ own phones and TVs are. A good design plans coverage room by room, using the building’s construction rather than a generic assumption.
Plan for capacity, not just coverage
Coverage tells you whether a device can connect. Capacity tells you whether it can work properly when everyone else is connected too. Count the devices you expect — per resident, per member of staff, plus building systems and visitors — and allow for growth. Care technology is being added to homes all the time.
Make roaming work
Staff walk the building all day with tablets and phones. The design and configuration should let those devices hand over cleanly from one access point to the next, without drops in calls or care applications.
Separate the networks
Care systems, staff, residents, guests and building systems should each sit on their own network segment, with priority for care traffic and isolation for guests. See why staff and resident WiFi should be separated.
Build a proper backbone
Wireless is only as good as what sits behind it. That means enough switching and power over Ethernet for every access point and device, a fibre backbone between floors or wings in larger buildings, and a comms room with suitable space, power and cooling.
Don’t rely on a single internet line
Fibre should be the primary connection. Where the site suits it, a Starlink or 5G backup with automatic failover adds resilience. When cloud-based care records and monitoring depend on the internet, a single line is a single point of failure.
Make it look like it belongs
Access points sit in people’s homes. Positions should be agreed with the design team so equipment is unobtrusive in bedrooms, lounges and dining rooms.
Document it
Every design should end with accurate records: what was installed, where, and how it’s configured. Without them, the network becomes hard for anyone to support.
Getting it right first time
The cheapest time to get this right is during design and construction. For a new build, bring a network specialist in before the electrical design is fixed. For an existing home, start with a survey of what’s there today.