31–40 of 242 posts
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It really depends on the phone and the AP. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202628
I thought you could use aggressive approaches by letting the AP's just kick the device off the AP so it's forced to join a better one?
I build public Wi-Fi networks, you've probably used one of them. AMA if you have Wi-Fi questions. To say it "sucks" is a bit harsh. It's delivering multiple hundreds of Mbps to you via an unlicensed contention-based medium. The air interface is like sending packets over a noisy Ethernet hub; it's impressive it works as well as it does. That said, this article's a good primer on some of the protocol's fundamental chal…
Have you ever built "moving" wifi networks (trains, planes), and do those have special challenges?
If the client is moving >10MPH relative to a fixed AP (i.e. you're driving past the AP in your car), Wi-Fi doesn't handle that well. Your movement creates Doppler shift in your RF signal, which Wi-Fi can't adjust for (vs. e.g. LTE which does).
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Does roaming devices between APs actually work? I reading through ubiquiti forums and it looks like they used to support it, but backed out of it. My specific usecase is moving around the office while being on google hangouts on my phone.
Yes it absolutely does, but it is dependent on the station (the client) doing so. One of my gripes about Wi-Fi is that it delegates too much to the station - your experience is thus dictated by whoever wrote your phone/computer's Wi-Fi chipset driver, and how they interpret the standard. Any Wi-Fi network supports roaming on the network side, you just need all of your access points to use the same SSID, and to dump u…
We're using mostly apple hardware + ubiquiti APs, and to be honest I expected everything to "just work" with the defaults...
I build public Wi-Fi networks, you've probably used one of them. AMA if you have Wi-Fi questions. To say it "sucks" is a bit harsh. It's delivering multiple hundreds of Mbps to you via an unlicensed contention-based medium. The air interface is like sending packets over a noisy Ethernet hub; it's impressive it works as well as it does. That said, this article's a good primer on some of the protocol's fundamental chal…
What hardware, and what kind of settings do you need to seek to have a working roaming network? I've a Mikrotik router at home (very educational), and I've very often heard UniFi ap's can do it properly. Can I do it with Mikrotik aps? Will setting it up be hell?
1. All APs use the same SSID
2. All APs bridge users onto the same subnet
But the experience will vary from client to client in terms of how aggressively they roam. Many AP vendors offer knobs to "help" clients roam by kicking clients off at a certain signal threshold, supposedly triggering a roam: in practice, this just upsets many clients.
Re #1: "SSID" is actually shorthand for "ESSID" - Extended service set identifier. Each AP has its own "BSSID" - Basic service set identifier, which is the AP's Wi-Fi MAC address. The whole concept of an "ESSID" is to signal to clients that a certain group of APs belong to the same system.
Re #2: If you need to scale beyond a single subnet, you generally solve for this by terminating users on a centralized packet core / wireless controller, which shards users out onto multiple subnets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever built "moving" wifi networks (trains, planes), and do those have special challenges?
Yes and nothing special, as long as the clients and AP are moving consistent to each other. If the client is moving >10MPH relative to a fixed AP (i.e. you're driving past the AP in your car), Wi-Fi doesn't handle that well. Your movement creates Doppler shift in your RF signal, which Wi-Fi can't adjust for (vs. e.g. LTE which does).
To don't have a huge network drop we used a VPN connection on the client computer so it had the same IP while jumping from one wifi over to the other one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes it absolutely does, but it is dependent on the station (the client) doing so. One of my gripes about Wi-Fi is that it delegates too much to the station - your experience is thus dictated by whoever wrote your phone/computer's Wi-Fi chipset driver, and how they interpret the standard. Any Wi-Fi network supports roaming on the network side, you just need all of your access points to use the same SSID, and to dump u…
Should I set channels on the APs in some specific way? We're using mostly apple hardware + ubiquiti APs, and to be honest I expected everything to "just work" with the defaults...
I build public Wi-Fi networks, you've probably used one of them. AMA if you have Wi-Fi questions. To say it "sucks" is a bit harsh. It's delivering multiple hundreds of Mbps to you via an unlicensed contention-based medium. The air interface is like sending packets over a noisy Ethernet hub; it's impressive it works as well as it does. That said, this article's a good primer on some of the protocol's fundamental chal…
Does roaming devices between APs actually work? I reading through ubiquiti forums and it looks like they used to support it, but backed out of it. My specific usecase is moving around the office while being on google hangouts on my phone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and nothing special, as long as the clients and AP are moving consistent to each other. If the client is moving >10MPH relative to a fixed AP (i.e. you're driving past the AP in your car), Wi-Fi doesn't handle that well. Your movement creates Doppler shift in your RF signal, which Wi-Fi can't adjust for (vs. e.g. LTE which does).
I worked a place that did roaming from one AP to another one on a train in Norway in the early 2000 / late 90s, think we was the first in the world to do it. To don't have a huge network drop we used a VPN connection on the client computer so it had the same IP while jumping from one wifi over to the other one.
I filed a FCC complaint on Frontier delivering 10th of their speeds. They gave me an upgraded connection that gave me full 30Mbps within a week.
The only way Corporations are going to learn how to back off is when they have to pay for their mistakes.
Wifi sucks because Ethernet is still better in all aspects but mobility to this day.
Wow, it's better "in all aspects but mobility"? You're kidding. You may as well complain that batteries suck because the only advantage they have over just plugging something in is portability.