15 years later and multi AP setups are still terrible

[Nonprofit]

This was a thorn in my side when I first moved into an apartment larger than a single AP could cover efficiently... that was 15 years ago.

And it still a problem for me today. It is one of things I keep saying to myself... have we really not found a solution to this problem yet? With all of the advances in technology that we've experienced?!

I have a largish home now - certainly not a mansion, but bigger than any single AP could cover efficiently. So I have 3 wifi routers wired together and set up around the house. Two on the main living floor, one on each end of the house, and one in the upstairs floor right smack in the middle of the house. They are Netgear Nighthawks AC1900. They all run the same SSID, but are on different channels. I have zero outside interference. Closest neighbor is miles away.

Coverage and performance is wonderful, as long as you start off near an AP and never move from it. But walking from one end of the house to the other is an exercise in frustration. It is the sticky client BS. The phones and laptops will simply refuse to give up the weak signal and jump to the closer one. In fact, sometimes they actually will drop the weak signal, but still refuse to jump to the close one. You can see this play out on phones especially, they will drop Wifi and jump over to 3g instead of jumping to the AP I am now standing right next to. I have to turn off the wifi on the phone, then back on, before it will pick it up. Same for the laptops I test.

I've tried other setups. I even bought a bunch of Unifis and setup a zero handoff roaming network. This was a year ago, so maybe that tech has improved since then, but it was not very impressive when I tried it (we use them at work, and have since turned ZH off)

So I guess my question (plea?) is... are there any technologies, new or otherwise, that I can try to implement to solve this?

 

[gatorback]

This is in interesting problem. The question that sits in my mind is which devices / technologies implement 'roaming' effectively?

If a device is designed (hell-bent) on sticking with a wifi AP, it would need a routine to constantly monitor signal strengths and choose the strongest. Perhaps this is an opportunity for a clever app.

Does this problem persist on 5GhZ? Maybe the range improvement with this tech can simplify your problem to 1 device?

 

[stevech]

This was a thorn in my side when I first moved into an apartment larger than a single AP could cover efficiently... that was 15 years ago.

And it still a problem for me today. It is one of things I keep saying to myself... have we really not found a solution to this problem yet? With all of the advances in technology that we've experienced?!

I have a largish home now - certainly not a mansion, but bigger than any single AP could cover efficiently. So I have 3 wifi routers wired together and set up around the house. Two on the main living floor, one on each end of the house, and one in the upstairs floor right smack in the middle of the house. They are Netgear Nighthawks AC1900. They all run the same SSID, but are on different channels. I have zero outside interference. Closest neighbor is miles away.

Coverage and performance is wonderful, as long as you start off near an AP and never move from it. But walking from one end of the house to the other is an exercise in frustration. It is the sticky client BS. The phones and laptops will simply refuse to give up the weak signal and jump to the closer one. In fact, sometimes they actually will drop the weak signal, but still refuse to jump to the close one. You can see this play out on phones especially, they will drop Wifi and jump over to 3g instead of jumping to the AP I am now standing right next to. I have to turn off the wifi on the phone, then back on, before it will pick it up. Same for the laptops I test.

I've tried other setups. I even bought a bunch of Unifis and setup a zero handoff roaming network. This was a year ago, so maybe that tech has improved since then, but it was not very impressive when I tried it (we use them at work, and have since turned ZH off)

So I guess my question (plea?) is... are there any technologies, new or otherwise, that I can try to implement to solve this?

Solution is managed WiFi for $$$ enterprise. No low cost fast handoffs in consumer. Probably because there's low mobility while operating WiFi, in a residence. We do have IEEE 802.11 standards for secure fast handoffs. But they're not popular. Managed WiFi for enterprise are mostly using proprietary methods and a special client on the mobile device. Biggest example is Vocera's clever wearable VoIP for highly mobile hospital staff. That mobility management is done by by proprietary means in enterprise WiFi from Cisco, Aruba and a few others.

But alas, residences with 1-3 access devices and a few largely immobile user devices, the need for the complexity of inter-AP collaboration outside the standards isn't strong enough to justify products. Handoff with security session credentials is hard. Especially sessions that use temporal keys (expiring). And doing so fast enough for VoIP or glitchless video streaming for in-home pedestrians just isn't much of a market.
What we do wish we had was simply a "best AP" for low mobility handhelds. It is hit and miss among vendors, esp. in a heterogeneous situation.

 

[sfx2000]

For many home office/small office networks - most folks work against best practices...

See below:

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/basi...751-snb-answer-guy-how-many-ssids-is-too-many

Doesn't take a lot of magic when dealing with just a couple of AP's and clients...

 

[JoeJoe]

Turn the power down of the 2.4 Ghz SSID to LOW. <----- IMPORTANT and only use channels 1 or 6 or 11, No other. 20 Mhz wide, so nothing overlaps.
Turn up the power of 5 Ghz to MEDIUM or HIGH.

Use a single SSID, same security for both frequencies.

"multi AP setups are still terrible"

No, you are not running a system like Ubiquiti Unifi, you are running routers in AP mode.
I use/install Unifi systems, very cheap, quite easy. Take a look.

"setup a zero handoff roaming network"
That was a mistake, needs to configured where APs overlap each other on the same exact 2.4 Ghz channel. The more APs, the slower the speed. ZH is not needed in 99.99999% of installs and is not supported in any new AP they sell.

"So I guess my question (plea?) is... are there any technologies, new or otherwise, that I can try to implement to solve this?"
Unifi works VERY well when configured correctly.

 

[thiggins]

JoeJoe: Does UniFi *reliably* deal with stubborn stick STAs? If yes, how?