Wireless Roaming

[drabisan]

@Matthew Patrick: technically speaking you won't see the disconnect in client UI. But if you're looking in the logs you will see a full disconnect and reconnect.
And it has to be like this since the client is "forced" to reconnect to a different BSSID.
Seamless roaming is mostly a wet-dream in the current technology.
As @RMerlin was stating: Smart Connect makes no sense for me either - especially between 2.4 and 5. It's reasonable useful for routers with 2x5GHz radios where is possible to balance clients based on capabilities between 2 radios.
Personally I'm not using 2.4 unless client doesn't support 5GHz. Instead of bad quality I would be choosing no wifi coverage (I'm fortunate enough to cover all the ground I need with 2 routers in 5GHz)

 

[Matthew Patrick]

@Matthew Patrick: technically speaking you won't see the disconnect in client UI. But if you're looking in the logs you will see a full disconnect and reconnect.
And it has to be like this since the client is "forced" to reconnect to a different BSSID.
Seamless roaming is mostly a wet-dream in the current technology.
As @RMerlin was stating: Smart Connect makes no sense for me either - especially between 2.4 and 5. It's reasonable useful for routers with 2x5GHz radios where is possible to balance clients based on capabilities between 2 radios.
Personally I'm not using 2.4 unless client doesn't support 5GHz. Instead of bad quality I would be choosing no wifi coverage (I'm fortunate enough to cover all the ground I need with 2 routers in 5GHz)

Hmm I see. So the client won't show the disconnect thing in the UI. But roaming assistant does show it being disconnected yeah on client's UI?

 

[drabisan]

It's fast enough for UI to react - at least in Android and Debian. Roaming does happen fast between router and node (I'm using AiMesh) and between 2 5GHz radios. But it's a full disconnect+reconnect and I can see that in the devices' logs.

 

[Matthew Patrick]

It's fast enough for UI to react - at least in Android and Debian. Roaming does happen fast between router and node (I'm using AiMesh) and between 2 5GHz radios. But it's a full disconnect+reconnect and I can see that in the devices' logs.

Roaming assistant? So it's fast enough for UI to react? Nice .tho. My need is for both to do the switching. So when it's on 2.4ghz if the signal strength got better than -X dBm it'll disconnect and try to steer it to 5ghz. And when it's less than -X dBm it'll disconnect and try to steer to 2.4 . Pretty simple. I hope I can do it with scripts. Hmm. Any idea? I mean. From 5ghz to 2.4 is easy using roaming assistant. But from 2.4 to 5. That's hard. Well smartconnect can do it. And I was going to use it. But since it locks the channel and channel width. That turns me off completely lol. Any suggestions so I can achieve this? Thanks mate [emoji4]

 

[coxhaus]

This sounds like band steering is not going to work very well for roaming and will drop a FaceTime call. I have 2 Cisco WAP371 wireless access points which I want to setup as a cluster in my house. I do not want to drop FaceTime calls switching APs. The WAP371 units support 802.11r and k.

I currently have 3 Cisco WAP321 wireless access units setup in cluster mode using 5GHz only in my house now. I have a long house. You can sit on the picnic table out back in my house running a FaceTime call and walk in my house and up to the front where the kitchen is and maintain a FaceTime call. The iPad blanks for 1 second then switches to the front Cisco WAP321 wireless unit with the FaceTime call not dropping. The WAP321 units do not support 802.11r or k and I only run 5GHz and not 2.4GHz also.

I want the same setup with my WAP371 units so they do not drop FaceTime calls. It sounds like from what I am hearing here I will need to turn off 2.4GHz and not use band steering. Is this correct?

PS
I am not using any external authentication for security only what is built-in to the cluster software.