Two access points w/ same SSID - different frequency

ShivP

ShivP

ShivP

Soldato
Soldato
Joined
26 Oct 2013
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Location
Leicester
Hi,

Basically, I have a recently purchased RT-AC87U. This is the router (DHCP), which then splits to two rooms, one of which has a router with DHCP disabled acting as an access point. It's a Wireless G 2.4Ghz Billion jobbie, and I recently changed the SSID to be the same as the AC87U. However, I'm not getting very good roaming on the phone(s) from the AP to the router. Is this because they are different frequencies?

Thanks,

Shiv
 
You won't get very good roaming full stop unless you use dedicated access points with roaming built in.

However firstly you need to ensure they're on different channels.
 
Yep. Different passwords

The roaming works, its just not very good or very quick (smooth is what I'm trying to say)

With the different channels, does the different frequency not basically make it a different channel?
 
For roaming to work moderately well on "non roaming" kit you need to have the same SSID with the same password and encryption ideally with as much channel space between as possible. e.g. 1 and 11.

You will still have the occasional problem as they aren't designed to work seamlessly with other devices to provide what you want.
 
The clients handle roaming, if the client wants to hang onto a weak signal then it will do this.

'Proper' wireless systems get around this by kicking the client when another AP in the cluster can see it with a stronger signal than the AP it is currently connected to.

There's nothing really you can do to improve this with two random APs.
 
Even in a corporate environment, managed Cisco stuff doesn't hand over very well in my experience. Ive done similar at home and have set the roaming agressiveness to a higher setting.
 
mejinks said:
Even in a corporate environment, managed Cisco stuff doesn't hand over very well in my experience. Ive done similar at home and have set the roaming agressiveness to a higher setting.
Click to expand...

With controller based access points and CCX compatible clients it is seamless 99.9% of the time with VoIP calls (very occasionally hear a slight clip of the sound if you are for example listening to hold music, I've yet to notice it when having a normal conversation) and not something you'll ever notice with data clients.
 
I've tried multiple configurations on home kit with little success, the clients (phones/laptops) seem to like to hang on to weak signal and then when you've got the same SSID it's hard to override it. In the end I've just gone for 2 different SSID's and manually change it if I'm on a weak signal.
 
I found roaming works best when you use the same SSID, security and password, it doesn't work very well if any of these are different. It also seems to rely more on the client itself if it's able to roam, and how agressive this roaming algorithm is.
 
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