The Cricket Club of India in Mumbai is one of the country's most historic sports institutions — founded in 1933, with premises spanning multiple buildings across a substantial city-centre footprint: clubhouses, restaurants, recreation rooms and member lounges.
By the time we were brought in, in 2019, the club's Wi-Fi had been falling short of member expectations for some time. The existing installation was several years old, members were experiencing dropped connections and dead zones in areas where they expected the network to just work, and the club's instinct — like most organisations in this position — was to ask the existing vendor for more hardware. We suggested a different approach: before buying anything, find out what the actual problem was.
Measure the demand. Survey the failure.
The starting point was bandwidth modelling. Most Wi-Fi specifications get this wrong because they're built around headcount rather than what people are actually doing on the network. At a club like CCI, the difference matters: members streaming in lounges, staff running point-of-sale in restaurants, and event guests on temporary connections produce wildly different demand profiles. We modelled the realistic peak-demand picture area by area, against actual usage rather than vendor-brochure assumptions.
In parallel, we ran a full signal survey of the existing network and produced a heatmap of the real coverage. This is the step most projects skip, because it produces uncomfortable answers — but those answers are what make every subsequent decision defensible. Some areas had perfectly good signal but were saturated: too many devices on too few access points. Others had no signal at all because the building's concrete and historic interior fabric were absorbing RF in ways the original installer had never accounted for.
The diagnosis was the deliverable. Before any vendor was approached, CCI had an evidence-based picture of what was wrong with the existing network and what would need to change to fix it.
Specify, then put it out to vendors
With the brief and the diagnosis in hand, we documented what the club actually needed: the access point class that would handle the density, the placement strategy that addressed the dead zones, and the management capabilities the club would need to operate the network day to day. That document became the brief CCI used to evaluate vendors — a specification any qualified integrator could quote against, not a procurement exercise built around a particular brand.
The chosen vendor was TP-Link, whose access points were deployed across the premises and who have since published their own account of the project. The implementation proceeded against a design CCI owned and understood — not one a vendor had constructed to suit their own catalogue.
What this engagement demonstrates
The order of operations matters: measure first, design second, then go to vendors with a clear specification. It's the same logic we set out in our Wi-Fi design service, applied here on a real engagement.
The best validation we can offer for doing it this way around is that the executing vendor was confident enough in the outcome to publish their own case study about the project. When the integrator wants to talk about the work, you know the design held up.
For organisations that have inherited a Wi-Fi installation that's no longer fit for purpose, the path forward is rarely "buy more access points." It's usually "find out what's actually wrong, and act on the answer."