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My parents' house currently has a single 802.11b/g/n/ac access point. It covers about 2/3 of their first floor and 1/3 of their second floor. The rest is lacking signal. They want me to close this gap for them. Also, they have no cell service on their property and would like WiFi in their barn/workshop so that Mom can communicate with Dad easily when he's out there. I have already run ethernet out there to accomplish this.

I have three perfectly functional 802.11b/g/n (no ac) access points lying around. Because of this, the cost of using them is $0, which is important here. I'd like to use them, but I'm uncertain about the implications of mixing these with their existing 802.11b/g/n/ac access point. Some of their devices (phones/laptops/tablets) support only 802.11n, so I don't think those devices would notice the difference. But other devices support 802.11ac, and I don't know how they might behave in this environment.

Would there be negative implications for those devices to have some access points be 802.11n while one is 802.11ac? Would roaming be adversely affected / impossible?

Nick Williams
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It works just fine. People do it all the time. Most probably do it without even realizing it and never notice any problems.

Their AC clients will only get AC rates when associated to the one AC AP. So if you're doing a big download or a 4K video stream or whatever, you'll want to be associated the AC AP.

If you set all the APs to the same SSID (network name) and exact same security mode and passphrase, the clients should automatically roam from AP to AP without problems. However, you may also discover that some of your clients have lame roaming algorithms and are too "sticky"; they're too likely to stick with whatever AP they first found when they first booted/woke up. If that's a problem you might want to see if giving each AP a different SSID would be less hassle. You'd have to manually switch a client device from one SSID to another sometimes, but it might be a trade-off worth making.

Spiff
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Handoff when transitioning from one area to the other will be hassle free. 802.11ac, soon to be known as WiFi5, whether Wave 1 or Wave 2, is better than 802.11n, aka WiFi4. So, put your heaviest users in the 802.11ac area, and give 160MHz bandwidth to each router, using this chart of 5GHz channels (stick to the green channels for your country).

K7AAY
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