The small-office spec: 10 to 60 people
The awkward truth about small-office networking: a 15-person office is closer to a 60-person office than to a large house, because offices concentrate load. Forty people don't browse — they sit on simultaneous video calls at 9:01 AM, and the network either absorbs that or becomes everyone's standing agenda item.
Count clients, then triple it
Headcount × 3 is the honest device count: laptop, phone, and the pile of shared gear — printers, TVs, badge readers, the coffee machine that inexplicably wants WiFi. A 20-person office is a 60-client network. Size everything to that number, not to the headcount.
The gateway: where home gear taps out first
Consumer routers die by session count, not bandwidth. The Dream Machine Pro ($475) handles 1,000+ clients with inspection on and gives you the rack form factor an office should be in; the SE ($625) adds PoE and storage and is the single-box answer up to about 25 people. Past 40 heavy users or multi-gig fiber, the Pro Max ($749) buys session and camera headroom you won't have to revisit.
APs: density beats reach
At home you space APs for coverage. In an office you space them for airtime — one AP per 12–15 concurrent heavy users is the planning number we use for call-heavy teams. A 20-person office wants two U7 Pros ($235), not one heroic one; forty people across a floor wants three to four, or Pro Max units ($349) in the dense zones. Conference rooms get priority placement — that's where the embarrassment happens.
The three VLANs every office needs
- Staff — the default network, firewalled like you mean it.
- Guest — internet-only, isolated, with a captive portal if you like the branding. UniFi does this natively; no extra license.
- Devices/IoT — printers, TVs, sensors, door controllers. Things that need to exist but never need to see payroll.
This is a checkbox exercise in the UniFi controller, and it's the single clearest line between "office network" and "house network worn unconvincingly to work."
The rack, briefly
Gateway, a PoE switch sized with real budget math — the Pro Max 24 PoE ($999) carries a typical office of this size — a UNVR ($375) once entry cameras arrive, and a tidy patch field. Wall-mount rack, 12U, done.
When to stop reading and just ask
Multi-site, PoE door access, NET-30 purchasing, or a landlord-grade wiring situation: that's commercial quote territory — an engineer specs it, with VLANs and growth headroom in the document, not in the upsell. Browse the enterprise page if you're the IT person being asked to make this decision by Friday.
Prices current at publication.