My house is quite long and I use three access points connected via ethernet to provide adequate wifi coverage everywhere. In the past I've given all three access points the same SSID and passphrase so that you only need to input the password once and then your device can choose the strongest signal to connect to itself. The problem with this was that when you walk around inside the house your phone will sometimes hold onto an access point that's further away rather than hop onto the closest automatically, which means sometimes you find your wifi on one bar and barely working even though there's a router in the room you're in. When this happened I had to turn wifi on and off again to have the phone find the closest AP. In the end I just renamed the access points to different SSIDs so I can select the closest one to connect to if the phone hasn't worked it out itself. Additionally, when the phone did lose a far away access point and automatically connect to another there was a delay of a few seconds whilst this happened, which means videos or downloads can pause.
My question is this - do 'mesh' wifi systems overcome this issue somehow? Or is a mesh system just a re-branded version of using multiple APs with the same SSID and has the same issues?
My question is this - do 'mesh' wifi systems overcome this issue somehow? Or is a mesh system just a re-branded version of using multiple APs with the same SSID and has the same issues?