Seamless multiple access points

[Bestlink101]

So I wanted to blanket my property with wifi, I had a asus rt-ac68, I put that in the guest house (it's around 400-500 ft away from main house) and then I bought a asus ac-87 for my main house 

I set up the 68 to ap mode and the 87 as the main, changed the ip addresses

i get an impressive coverage, however I noticed that I don't get a seamless transition, sometimes I have to disconnect it and reconnect, have no experience w wireless networking so a learning experience, and noticed that I have two available connections, I thought it would've been the same? 

How would I get it to have better transitions and would I have any problems with the wifi competing? 

[brwainer]

21 minutes ago, mcraftax said:

The best you can do is give them the same SSID (wlan name) and put them on different channels. Still devices will cling to one, even if it is weaker some/most of the time.

Only solution I know that has seamless handoff/roaming is ubiquiti unifi aps

The 802.11ac unifi APs do not support seamless roaming, it is a long overdue promised feature, but there have been unofficial statements by important employees that it probably won't ever come because they don't think it is actually an important feature.

[brwainer]

5 minutes ago, mcraftax said:

Ok thanks, edited

Np. Lots of people get confused because it was a major selling point for the unifi line for many years, and the first UAP-AC (the square one that sold for ~$300) said it would be coming in a software update, but it never did.

 

The only companies remaining that have 802.11ac products with roaming are some of the enterprise wireless companies who first invented the feature, the companies who Ubiquiti was copying. Their APs cost $500+ and require central controllers that can cost as much as $20,000 (if you want the seamless handoff feature)

 

In the home/small business world, the closest you can get is having all your APs set up with the exact same SSID, security, AND pasword, on different channels, and the APs overlapped enough that a device gets decent speeds (really signal strength) on either at the points roughly equal between the two.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, brwainer said:

The 802.11ac unifi APs do not support seamless roaming, it is a long overdue promised feature, but there have been unofficial statements by important employees that it probably won't ever come because they don't think it is actually an important feature.

Well that's insane since it is an important feature, at least it is for me and for what I would use them for.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, brwainer said:

The only companies remaining that have 802.11ac products with roaming are some of the enterprise wireless companies who first invented the feature, the companies who Ubiquiti was copying. Their APs cost $500+ and require central controllers that can cost as much as $20,000 (if you want the seamless handoff feature)

 

In the home/small business world, the closest you can get is having all your APs set up with the exact same SSID, security, AND pasword, on different channels, and the APs overlapped enough that a device gets decent speeds (really signal strength) on either at the points roughly equal between the two.

Seamless roaming, band steering and client steering on Aruba controllers and APs works extremely well. Aruba also have what's called Instant Controller which gives you a sub set of controller features but it all runs on an AP, with master election and failover.

 

Pretty sure Ruckus has these same features, used Aruba a lot more than Ruckus but I'm sure it has it. Hate the Ruckus controllers compared to Aruba though but it is a large price difference.

 

Aerohive has band steering and client steering/load balancing.

 

Cisco has all the steering/load balancing features but funnily enough I don't really care for their wireless solutions, even though I'm a big fan of their switches/routers.

 

I plan on buying used Aruba access points and a controller when I get round to it. Not actually something I would recommend unless your an experienced wireless installer, will be a very quick case of 'too much information' otherwise.

 

@Bestlink101

As others mentioned your best option is to have two access points with about 20% signal overlap broadcasting the same SSID on different channels and change your roaming aggressiveness/speed on the wireless NIC for your client/computer to a quick setting.

[brwainer]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Seamless roaming, band steering and client steering on Aruba controllers and APs works extremely well. Aruba also have what's called Instant Controller which gives you a sub set of controller features but it all runs on an AP, with master election and failover.

 

Pretty sure Ruckus has these same features, used Aruba a lot more than Ruckus but I'm sure it has it. Hate the Ruckus controllers compared to Aruba though but it is a large price difference.

 

Aerohive has band steering and client steering/load balancing.

 

Cisco has all the steering/load balancing features but funnily enough I don't really care for their wireless solutions, even though I'm a big fan of their switches/routers.

 

I plan on buying used Aruba access points and a controller when I get round to it. Not actually something I would recommend unless your an experienced wireless installer, will be a very quick case of 'too much information' otherwise.

 

@Bestlink101

As others mentioned your best option is to have two access points with about 20% signal overlap broadcasting the same SSID on different channels and change your roaming aggressiveness/speed on the wireless NIC for your client/computer to a quick setting.

I vaguely remember hearing about the Aruba instant controller - definitely a great feature there for smaller installations. We use primarily Ruckus at work, but the few times we have done installs with the full controller and roaming setup enabled, actual resident experience was hardly any better than our hand managed Ruckus installations (by hand managed I mean every AP programmed by SSH/scripts and monitored with our own selection of important SNMP OIDs).

 

We have one Meraki (whom I think is owned by Cisco now) install that is pretty slick, but we don't like it becuase it takes away too much TSing ability from us, and there have been a few times where updates by either Meraki or Apple have caused iOS or OSX clients to be completely unable to connect, for months at a time, with both pointing fingers at the other. And I'm not sure if Meraki has seamless roaming or not, but I believe the system does.

 

Haven't touched Aerohive, and the only times we use Cisco APs is when we inherit them, and they get reprogrammed to just be dumb APs.

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, brwainer said:

I vaguely remember hearing about the Aruba instant controller - definitely a great feature there for smaller installations. We use primarily Ruckus at work, but the few times we have done installs with the full controller and roaming setup enabled, actual resident experience was hardly any better than our hand managed Ruckus installations (by hand managed I mean every AP programmed by SSH/scripts and monitored with our own selection of important SNMP OIDs).

 

We have one Meraki (whom I think is owned by Cisco now) install that is pretty slick, but we don't like it becuase it takes away too much TSing ability from us, and there have been a few times where updates by either Meraki or Apple have caused iOS or OSX clients to be completely unable to connect, for months at a time, with both pointing fingers at the other. And I'm not sure if Meraki has seamless roaming or not, but I believe the system does.

 

Haven't touched Aerohive, and the only times we use Cisco APs is when we inherit them, and they get reprogrammed to just be dumb APs.

Yea Ruckus APs are very good as they focus on making the antennas/aerials exceptionally good rather than using fancy on-chip software like the other brands do.

 

By cisco I meant actual cisco, I care about meraki so much I totally forgot about them . Never used meraki btw and I'm not going to willingly, any networking hardware that is reliant on and managed by a cloud solution can burn in hell, this used to include aerohive until they brought out the virtual appliance controller. It's not the case anymore but when cloud managed wireless solutions lost internet access all APs would shutdown, why anyone thought that was a good idea is beyond me.

 

Also Apple devices I have noticed are the ones that have the most issues with enterprise wireless setups, they tend to ignore the standards and use their own probe timers/AP roaming/power control which get in the way of what solutions like Aruba try to do. I guess this is part of Ubnt reasoning to not bother with stuff like that.