Hacker News Reader

Comment by willidiots | Hacker News Reader

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 users onto the same subnet consistently (otherwise you'll need to re-IP after roaming).

View on HN

So on that note, do you have any brands/manufacturers/chipsets that you see as particularly good in terms of being a client?

Its always a gamble when I get a new phone/laptop/device if it will work with the multi-AP setup I have in my house, and I'm really tired of getting something and bringing it home only to find it hangs on to the furthest AP for dear life.

> So on that note, do you have any brands/manufacturers/chipsets that you see as particularly good in terms of being a client?

As a client, the Intel wifi hardware works quite well, as does the software stack on top of it (at least on Linux). It helps that they're the ones who've written a fair bit of the wifi stack itself.

Ubiquiti UniFi AC or UniFi AC-LR. I'm not the poster above you were asking. Never need rebooting. Present a single AP name for multiple devices and both 2.4 and 5.x GHz. Reasonable price for home use. Based on personal experience in a large house. grk, roaming works just fine.

Klathmon was asking about clients, not APs.

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've heard that Apple hardware in particular sticks with an AP longer than other devices, the Apple device is not continually looking for the best connection, it sticks with what it started with until the signal gets very weak. Don't take this literally but it's like Apple waits until you're down to one bar while some others wait until you're down to two bars before looking for a stronger connection from another AP.

You should make sure the APs don't interfere with each other. The automatic channel selection didn't work well for me. I had to manually set my two APs at each end of the 2.4GHz spectrum. It's also a good idea to turn on wide band channel. If you have an Android device somewhere you can download wifi analyser to make sure the channels don't overlap.

They don't need to be on different channels, but it's recommended for performance (due to co-channel interference).

Think of it this way: Each channel provides a fixed amount of bandwidth, and neighboring APs need to overlap slightly to provide seamless coverage. As a first order approximation, if two APs are on the same channel you'll have twice the range, but half the bandwidth because the spectrum would be shared between them.

(It's actually slightly worse than this, because collisions will happen causing additional overhead.)

I have a ubiquiti AP and as part of the set up it did a scan which picked my channels based on what it scanned and it seemed to do a decent job. You can go into the controller software to initiate a scan, though it will kick everything off the network for a few minutes.

If you option-click on the wifi symbol in the macOS menu bar, there's an option to access various diagnostic tools. One of them gives you channel recommendations as well.

Channel selection won't affect roaming, so you shouldn't need to. What specific problem are you having?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com