With the arrival of Wi-Fi 7, nearly all vendors now offer access points supporting multiple 5 GHz or 6 GHz radios on a single access point. This advancement gives wireless engineers the powerful tool they’ve sought for years to tackle capacity challenges. But with great power comes great responsibility. In this post, let’s look at the new pitfalls these access points introduce and why using access points in traditional 2.4/5/6 or 5/6 mode by default makes more sense.
The Perception Trap: More capacity – fewer APs?
When engineers mention more radios per AP, management’s first question is often: “Can we use fewer access points and save money?” On paper, more active radios should mean higher capacity and better user experience. But in enterprise Wi-Fi, capacity is not where you begin—it’s coverage that matters first. Design for primary and secondary coverage (with redundancy for failures and roaming), and only then layer additional APs for capacity in high-density areas as needed. This principle should continue to be the foundation for WiFi designs. While in some environments you might reduce AP count with dual-band multi-radio APs, in others—especially non-high-density, closed rooms—coverage and desired redundancy will still determine the deployment count.
The POE Trap: Powering All Those Radios
Enabling multiple radios (dual 5 GHz or 6 GHz, for instance) often requires 802.3bt (> 30W) PoE. Running in lower power (PoE+) mode might drop radios to two streams instead of four, which still provides extra capacity but with trade-offs. More active radios mean a bigger power draw from switches, which can strain port- and chassis-level PoE budgets. Always double-check that your switches can supply the required power before enabling all radios.
The RRM Trap: Interference & Channel Planning
To enable more radios on the same band, vendors restrict radios to specific UNI-bands to avoid adjacent channel interference. For example one radio may be confined to use UNI-1 and UNI-2 and other radio to UNI-2E and UNI-3. In this case, the number of available channels for reuse becomes fewer in the environment. If every AP runs two radios in the same band, managing co-channel interference becomes difficult, and efficient channel planning may be difficult to achieve. You may end up with more co-channel contention, negating the benefits of increased AP capacity.
The Backhaul Trap: Uplink Bottlenecks
With more capacity per access point, there’s a high probability of exceeding 1 Gbps of aggregate throughput across the multiple radios. This means the wired Ethernet connection between the switch and each AP can quickly become a bottleneck, if only standard 1 Gigabit links are in use. If deploying tri-band multi-radio APs, it’s critical to ensure that the backhaul—switch ports, cabling, and AP uplinks—can support higher throughput to avoid undermining wireless performance gains. Consider upgrading to 2.5 or 5 Gigabit Ethernet options where increased capacity is required.
In summary, operating tri-band access points in single-radio on a single-band mode by default—and enabling software-defined radios for additional bands only when justified—helps address capacity constraints without falling into the common traps of backhaul bottlenecks, power limitations, RRM complexity, or misaligned coverage. This careful, needs-driven approach gets the best value from today’s powerful multi-radio hardware without introducing unnecessary risks.
Wireless Gnan 