thank you
@drinkingbird - that is so helpful. It explains why I only have this issue with a few clients that are 2.4ghz only. I have been happy with how my 5ghz clients move between the two bands and between my AiMesh nodes.
Yeah the 2.4ghz signal travels much further and clients hang onto it much longer than 5ghz.
I just need to use/tune roaming assist on the 2.4ghz band to force these sticky clients to reconnect. I will set the threshold to -70 and report back on how I get on.
Yes you can even try -60 and -50 (-70 is usable but pretty weak signal, depending how much overlap you have between APs, you should be able to go lower and get better handover). If your clients support adjusting the roaming aggressiveness, you can set that to "maximum" on them too. Intel WIFI adapters on windows PCs have it but you usually need their official drivers (either from intel or the PC manufacturer) and not the inbuilt windows drivers to get that feature. Some android phones have it under developer options but I found it didn't really work well.
Interesting that if I get roaming assist working well on both bands then smart connect is not needed - this is inline with
@Morris experience. I thought that smart connect did something clever (smart) to cleanly handover between nodes (e.g. without glitching facetime/teams calls)
Nope, smart connect is just a way to have a single SSID and force clients to prefer 5Ghz, but since most clients do that anyway now (they didn't always), it often isn't much if any benefit over just setting the two bands to the same SSID yourself.
What you were thinking is another feature I forgot to mention. "Seamless Roaming" which existed on N and AC wireless from some vendors, but was proprietary to each vendor and was pretty buggy (Ubiquiti had it working ok but still had issues, some brands got it working better than others). Some of the mesh systems that came out had an implementation of it, but none of them could do it great since there was nothing on the client side working with it to make it smooth. You really need both sides working together, which N and AC did not have. Most of them gave all the APs the same MAC address, channel, etc, making the client think there was just one AP and as it roamed between them, it didn't even know it. But it never really worked all that great as if you didn't have your APs spaced just right it would end up bouncing back and forth, losing a few packets each time, and degrading the quality of your connection.
On AX/Wifi6 there is a new implementation (the first standardized implementation of seamless roaming) that if both the client and AP support it, will switch APs within about 1/10 of a second and give you uninterrupted streaming, calls, etc. It is constantly monitoring the various APs in range for the SSID and switches much sooner than older implementations did. There are actually 3 standards involved, 802.11k, 802.11r and 802.11v, they all work together to make this work. I'm not sure if any of the Asus AX routers support it yet though. In theory AIMESH on AX wifi, if/when they implement this, with clients that also support it, should have a very good experience when multiple APs are involved, basically the same as your cell phone as you're driving down the highway (they've had seamless roaming for decades now, and it is nearly perfect at this point, disconnects are very rare). When this feature becomes commonplace we'll finally have true mesh networks, rather than just multiple APs that have a hacked proprietary roaming algorithm on them.
