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I live in a quite large house. It's on four floors, and it has thick walls; having a reliable Wi-Fi connection everywhere is a struggle.

At the moment, I'm using several independent routers, each one with its own SSID and connected to the WAN network. This solution works fine as long as I'm standing still in one point, but as soon as I walk away from the router I start getting problems. Indeed my devices stay connected to a router until the connection drops, and only then they connect to the next router, causing a few seconds gap.

An alternative setup to mine would be using the same SSID, encryption and password for all the routers, so that my devices only see one network. The problem with this setup is essentially the same of the first one: even tho the devices only see one network, there are several different routers; so they tend to stay connected to one router until the connection drops, and then they switch to a better one, still causing a gap.

I think the best solution would be routers that "talk" to each other and handle the network switching by themselves, generating a single whole network so that it appears that only one router exists, and the devices keep transferring data seamlessly while moving from one point to another.

I think that's what the eero routers do. eeros talk to each other wirelessly, but I wouldn't mind wiring my routers together.

Does such a solution exist for "normal" routers? How should I set them up? Should I just buy some eero routers? Or should I just bear with my current setup?

user2747949
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1 Answers1

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You correctly noticed that Wi-Fi already handles roaming natively – that's what the SSID (network name) is for. If a device sees multiple access points with the same SSID, it assumes all of them are equivalent and roams whenever necessary.

However, for this to work properly you don't need "routers which talk to each other". You need quite the opposite – simple access points which are the Wi-Fi equivalent of an Ethernet switch, with no routing functionality in them.

There needs to be one router somewhere, for serving DHCP and stuff – possibly within the same device as a Wi-Fi access point, but not necessarily.

                                      ---- [AP]
                                     /
(internet) ~~~ [modem] --- [router] ----- [AP]
                                     \
                                      [switch] -- [AP]
                                       |  |  \
                                      AP  AP  AP

While this is not the place for product recommendations, I've been looking recently into the standalone Wi-Fi APs sold by UniFi and Mikrotik. However, if you already have a pile of "wireless routers", you can easily turn them into pure access points.

To reiterate the dozens of existing pages on "how to stack two routers":

  1. first see if the router has a dedicated 'bridge' mode – if yes, just enable it;
  2. otherwise, turn off DHCP Server (and perhaps UPnP) in the device, and connect it to the main 'upstream' router through a LAN port – this will bypass the actual "router" component, and connect Wi-Fi to the existing LAN.
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u1686_grawity
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    I think the nexus if the question here is **seamless** roaming. Does this work with the solution you describe? When I am in a VOIP-Call and walk around the house, I don‘t want to lose connection, before my client reconnects to the next AP available. – Senkaku Jul 11 '20 at 13:11
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    There will be a moment of packet loss during the process, but you retain the same IP address, you're still using the same router, etc. so transport connections will remain unaffected and any decent protocol will recover quickly. (I tested standard roaming between two Mikrotik home APs using `ping -f` "flood ping" mode and it reported only two packets being lost during the switchover. I also tried `iperf3` continuously downloading data from a wired machine and it seamlessly went through 10 switchovers. Though it had one 8-second pause the on the first try but recovered all the same.) – u1686_grawity Jul 11 '20 at 14:46
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    In short, it should be _almost_ seamless most of the time, and that's why I'm always putting so much emphasis on the difference between routers (which manage separate IP networks) and access points (which attach you to the same IP network). If all your APs and client devices support features like 802.11r (Fast Transition), then it's supposed to improve on that even more, but I don't have any hardware to test – and I'm guessing that's mainly an issue for WPA-Enterprise (which has a quite elaborate authentication handshake) and less so for WPA-Personal. – u1686_grawity Jul 11 '20 at 14:51
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    One other issue might be that some devices are reluctant to roam in the first place. For example, I have one 2.4GHz AP and one 2.4+5GHz AP, and while 5GHz was available my laptop tried to stretch the connection as far as it could, even losing packets because it insisted on _not_ roaming to a closer AP. On the other hand, after disabling 5GHz, it then was quite eager to roam between the two remaining 2.4GHz 802.11n APs. – u1686_grawity Jul 11 '20 at 14:53
  • Thought about that too, but both APs offer 2.4 and 5GHz and the second AP is just a bridge. My laptop sometimes though is eager to keep the connection with the AP I am moving away from, even if that means I have so much packet loss, that my meeting connection comes to a hold for 10+ seconds. Have to check for 802.11r of my second AP. Thanks for your elaborate comment! – Senkaku Jul 17 '20 at 11:38
  • Basically what I meant. My second AP is also a fully fledged router and I turned it into a plain AP. It was just written to clarify that it‘s not managing it‘s own network and thus the problem should not be rooted there. – Senkaku Jul 17 '20 at 12:48
  • On Windows, some Wi-Fi drivers have a "Roaming aggressiveness" or "Roaming sensitivity" knob. I think having "Background scan" enabled might also be a requirement (AFAIK some people disable it for gaming). – u1686_grawity Jul 17 '20 at 12:48