Coconut Creek, FL · Field project from our service history, exact dates on request
Warehouse Wi-Fi That Survived a Metal Roof and Peak Season
A large fulfillment warehouse in Coconut Creek, just north of the Sawgrass Expressway on Lyons Road, stocked more than a thousand perfume types on rows of shelving and shipped roughly 3,000 to 5,000 online orders a day. Orders arrived on paper at packing stations, workers verified each one against the boxed product, Zebra printers produced the labels, and a computer at the receiving and shipping dock coordinated the daily batch pickups with UPS, FedEx, and USPS. An office wing ran accounting, an eBay team, and administration. All of it depended on a Wi-Fi network built from consumer routers, under a metal roof.
By Lazaro Anias, founder & engineer. Published . Updated .
- Location
- Coconut Creek, FL
- Project period
- Field project from our service history, exact dates on request
- Scope
- Warehouse Wi-Fi, VLANs and shipping-workflow traffic
Where it stands: Completed engagement. The connection drops at the shipping dock and packing stations stopped in the period that followed, and the operation kept processing roughly 3,000 to 5,000 online orders a day through the new network.
The challenge
- A metal roof and dense metal shelving are close to the worst radio environment a wireless network can live in. Signals reflected and died in dead zones, and the consumer routers scattered around the building could not coordinate channels or hand devices off cleanly.
- Connections dropped at the packing stations and at the dock computer during peak processing, which is exactly when a fulfillment operation can least afford it. A stalled label printer or an offline dock workstation holds up carrier batch pickups with real shipping deadlines.
- Warehouse devices, security cameras, office computers, and personal phones all shared one flat network, so any congested device could slow the traffic the business actually ran on.
What we built
RF spectrum analysis before hardware
We measured interference and coverage under the metal roof first, then chose access point positions based on the shelving layout and the real dead zones instead of guessing from a floor plan.
Centrally managed UniFi access points
Consumer routers were replaced by UniFi access points managed from a controller, with channel planning and positions chosen for the warehouse layout.
VLAN segmentation by function
Warehouse operations (Zebra printers, packing station computers, the dock workstation), the camera system, the office network, and guest devices were separated onto their own VLANs with firewall rules between them.
QoS that protects the work that ships orders
Quality of Service rules prioritized label-printing and dock traffic over general browsing. Segmentation separated functions; QoS addressed traffic priority.
The results
- The reported connection drops at the dock and packing stations stopped in the period following the rebuild.
- Label-printing and dock traffic received priority treatment for the carrier pickup workflow.
- Separate warehouse, camera, office and guest networks made traffic easier to isolate and diagnose.
Client not named by policy. The facility is in Coconut Creek, in the Lyons Road corridor of northwest Broward County. Order volume is the figure reported by the client during the engagement.
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