Site-wide WiFi for a site that won’t stand still
Office WiFi design assumes the building is finished. Jobsite WiFi design assumes the opposite: the site changes shape every week, the biggest RF obstacle on the property is the thing you’re building, and everything you install today gets unbolted at handover. Design for that honestly and jobsite WiFi is straightforward. Here’s the architecture we deploy.
Layer 1: the backhaul — bond your way to real bandwidth
Everything hangs off the internet uplink, so size it first. Forget single-carrier hotspots; the backhaul is a bonded cellular gateway that aggregates multiple paths into one connection with SpeedFusion:
- Standard site: a BR2 Pro 5G with dual-SIM carrier redundancy — one strong carrier active, second carrier hot behind it.
- Mid-rise commercial: a MAX HD2 bonding two carriers simultaneously — 200–600 Mbps aggregate in metro areas, and tower congestion on one carrier stops mattering.
- Mega-site or thin coverage: a MAX HD4 bonding four carriers, with Starlink added into the bond as one more WAN path.
Sizing rule of thumb: budget 1–2 Mbps sustained per active office user, 2–4 Mbps per HD camera stream, and headroom for burst events — a 4 GB drone photogrammetry upload, a full BIM model pull. A 100-person site with 12 cameras lands around 150–300 Mbps of comfortable aggregate, which is exactly the HD2’s territory. Need more later? Scale like Lego — add a carrier, add Starlink, add a modem. No construction quote required.
Mount the gateway high on the trailer or a mast with the antennas outside the metal box, not inside it. A SIM Injector lets you pool and swap SIMs remotely — no ladder trips when you change data plans.
Layer 2: distribution — AP One Enterprise everywhere people work
From the gateway, AP One Enterprise access points carry WiFi to where the work is. Day-one placement for a typical mid-rise:
- Trailer complex: one AP per trailer pair. PMs, plans, VoIP.
- Laydown yard and gates: one or two APs in IP-rated enclosures — deliveries get scanned, access control stays online.
- Camera positions: cameras and time-lapse units join the WiFi or wire into the nearest AP, on their own VLAN.
Then the part office WiFi never deals with: the building rises, and coverage climbs with it. Concrete decks and steel kill signal floor-to-floor, so plan an AP “hoist run” — an access point every two to three floors, leapfrogging upward with the structure, powered from temp power and wired or wirelessly meshed back down. Crews on deck 8 pull current drawings on tablets at the work face instead of walking down to the trailer. Superintendents stop being human sneakernet.
Placement is not precious. These are movable assets on a movable site; if a pour or a wall changes the RF picture, you move an AP twenty feet. Ten minutes.
Layer 3: management — one dashboard, every site
Every gateway and AP enrolls in InControl, Peplink’s cloud management. Your IT director — or West Networks as your managed operator — sees every site in the fleet: WAN health per carrier, per-AP client counts, data usage against plan, config pushed centrally. When the job ends, the whole kit re-tags to the next site in minutes. The design survives handover because you own the network, not the address.
What this replaces
One architecture, one bill, one dashboard — replacing twenty crew hotspots ($1,000/month, zero management), per-camera SIM plans, and the standing fiction that “the trailer has WiFi” while the deck crews have nothing. Total for a mid-rise Site-Wide WiFi Kit: roughly $8k–$12k one-time plus $300–$800/month pooled data. The trench alternative starts at $10k, tops $60k, arrives in months, and stays behind when you leave.
The proof standard, as always: this same bonding stack holds live broadcast together at golf majors, F1, and SailGP. Your deck pour will not be the thing that breaks it.
Talk to West Networks → https://westnetworks.com/contact?utm_source=constructionconnectivity101.com&utm_medium=microsite&utm_campaign=connectivity101-construction&utm_content=blog-architecture
Shop the solution → https://buypeplink.com/products/max-hd2?utm_source=constructionconnectivity101.com&utm_medium=microsite&utm_campaign=connectivity101-construction&utm_content=blog-architecture
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