The St. James Building is City Hall — a historic building housing the City Council Chambers. I owned the wireless deployment end to end: wrote the specification and the bid, ran vendor selection, validated the respondents’ proposed architecture, and oversaw the installation.
Coverage as a number, not an adjective
The specification set coverage as a measurable threshold: no worse than -75 dBm across 802.11a, g, n and ac throughout the building, with elevators explicitly out of scope and basement coverage confined to areas people actually occupy. Naming the exclusions is part of the number. A specification that promises coverage everywhere is either dishonest or expensive, and usually both.
Acceptance was written to match. The vendor had to produce post-installation heat maps proving the threshold had actually been met, plus as-built AutoCAD or Visio drawings of access point placement. Where a coverage gap turned up, the vendor carried the cost of the additional access point, the horizontal wiring and the re-survey.
That last clause is the whole design. A performance number nobody has to prove is a wish; putting the remediation cost on the party that made the promise is what turns it into a requirement. It also changes who bids, and how carefully they survey before they price.
Removing variables before the bid
Two more things were settled in the specification rather than discovered during delivery.
Bidders were qualified before they bid — Cisco Gold Partner status with wireless design and network infrastructure specializations — so the evaluation was between firms that could all do the work, rather than between a real proposal and an optimistic one. And installation was pinned to the City’s existing full-service wiring contract, so procurement was not another variable running in parallel with the deployment.
The cable plant was specified down to the drop: one Category 6 run per access point, terminated in a ceiling biscuit and onto a modular patch panel in the originating IDF, patch cables end to end. Wireless projects fail as cabling projects more often than as radio projects.
A landmark before it is an estate
In the Council Chambers and the atrium, every mount was pre-approved and placed to be unobtrusive. Legislative proceedings happen in that room and the building itself is part of the record the city keeps of itself. An access point that solves a coverage problem by being visible from the dais has not solved the problem.
Outcome
A coverage promise the vendor had to prove after installation, at their own cost where it fell short.