I’m a happy owner of a hAP ax^3, everything works like a charm but my house has 2 floors and a really good isolation layer and you can guess… signal upstairs is really bad. I managed to pass an ethernet cable (i’m using it now on my laptop) But i would like to have a strong wifi signal.
I’m on a budget so i was checking which options do i have and i found that the hAP ax lite brings wifi6 and i can also connect by wire to my laptop and leave phone, table on the wifi. And price wise is really good.
So my question is:
Can i use a hapAX lite on top of my ax3 as an AP (using capsman)?
If is not the case, which other options do i have? I also checked the cap AX but it seems overkill for what i need and also i would prefer something more aesthetic
Yes, hap ax lite can be used but for 2 ap, it’s not worth the trouble to use capsman.
As a learning project, that’s something else, but not needed at all.
Cable from AX3 towards upstairs, AX Lite there in simple AP mode.
1 bridge
dhcp client on bridge
wireless interfaces set the same as on AX3 but different frequency (only 2.4GHz)
all interfaces (wired and wireless) connected to that one bridge.
→ 3 ethernet ports remaining for fixed clients
→ wifi network (only 2.4GHz) for clients using same SSID as downstairs.
When moving in your house, client devices will at a certain moment disconnect from AX3, see network of AX Lite and reconnect again there.
Except when doing online games (while moving around ??) or streaming video, you may not even notice it happens.
It is needed for seamless 802.11r roaming. Above advice would lead to poor multi AP experience with MikroTik.
According to the docs, roaming is possible only between APs that are managed via the same RouterOS instance (own wifi interfaces of the instance, plus CAPs managed by CAPsMAN from this instance):
For a client device to successfully roam between 2 APs, the APs need to be managed by the same instance of RouterOS. For information on how to centrally manage multiple APs, see CAPsMAN
I have setup hAP ax³ as CAPsMAN and AP, and hAP ac³ as AP. The 802.11r/k/v/ roaming works perfectly since I setup CAPsMAN (well, for some Android devices, WPA3 must be disabled - I mentioned it here previously). Now, I’ve added hAP ax² to the setup, and roaming works great between all three.
Without CAPsMAN, it would be very noticeable. Literally tens of seconds of poor connection barely transmitting few bytes,… before the client, and if ever by itself, “roams” (re-connects) to the closer AP / the one with better signal in current location.
The roaming did not work at all without CAPsMAN, and I had to manually re-connect (or turn off and on wifi on the client), when I moved to closer AP, even if literally standing 1m from the closest AP and the current connection was still hanging on AP behind 1 wall, 2 floors, and very weak signal.
I guess you missed my comment about not using capsman …
I have ax2 and ax3 at home, not in capsman setup.
Handover works just fine. Client looses signal and connects again to nearest AP.
Nobody here moves around with instant connection being required.
The only comment from you in this thread about CAPsMAN is, that it’s not needed. I saw the above. I have actually just edited the above comment to reply also to this.
Handover doesn’t happen. It’s disconnection and re-connection. On L3 (IP layer) nothing changes, on L2 it moves it’s physical location. However, transition/movement on L2 is not seamless, and not a roaming. This is acceptable issue. People on web don’t mind slower “roaming” / re-connection.
Also, devices tend to stick to current AP until they loose signal completely. Like, dead,.. no bytes coming through for tens of seconds. If they are having any (poor) connection, even just 1Mbps, they keep hanging on onto distant AP. This is not acceptable issue. People on web do mind, if it does load data at speed of 1Mbps with high packet drop.
Yes. On every single mobile device I worked with. Or even minutes, or not at all, as long as it didn’t loose signal completely, it stayed on AP even with horrible connection.
My wife even kept using mobile data (instead of wifi) on her phone in the house due to this,…
Just for you I walked around observing wifi connection on my phone.
Time between wifi interface being disconnected and being connected again to other AP is 2-3 secs max. Not more. Definitely not 10s of seconds.
Would it be better using capsman ?
Oh yes, I am pretty sure of that.
I have a warehouse setup with a client running 15 APs (mix of 11 cAP AX, 3 AX3 and 1 AX Lite, RB5009 as controller, overkill on that RB but planning on further use for it).
Moving from radio to radio is pretty instant there (Symbol warehouse scanners with an online application to server hosted in Azure which is pretty sensitive to disconnects on network so I know very well it roams fast enough).
Do I need that at home ? No.
Could I set it up at home ? Sure, I can.
Do I want to ? No. Much easier for me like it is now since I test quite a bit especially with the device being in my home office.
I guess our use cases and needs are quite different.
There’s more then one way to solve a problem.
Thanks. Do you happen to have overlap in signal between AP(s), or do you loose signal completely before it re-connects?
Agree. Instant vs 2-3 seconds slow re-connection is non-issue for home/SOHO setup.
Nah, we don’t. You just didn’t happen to have issue with devices not re-connecting to better AP at all. Because, for me, devices didn’t “roam” until signal was lost completely.
Though,.. thinking about this. The issue might have been caused also because of the WPA3 issue on Android devices, that I mentioned in the other thread. As, even with CAPsMAN, devices didn’t roam at all if WPA3 was enabled. And, I didn’t really walk around with laptop in this CAPsMAN-less setup with WPA3.
And, you’ve got hAP ax³ and hAP ax² combination. While, I did have hAP ax³ with hAP ac³ combination. And, this WPA3 issue might be specific only to hAP ac³ WifiWave2 drivers. So, I maybe hit some edge-case? However, that would require a test, and tedious redoing of my currently working setup to CAPsMAN-less configuration without WPA3 to test the hypothesis, as I don’t have any spare MikroTik devices.
