Hi there,
i have HAP AX3 and CAP AX and trying to do mesh network. I did connected AP to remote CAP on my router. I did created two networks for 2,4 and 5 ghz on both devices with same credentials and SSID. MY problem now is that even the signal is extremely low, my device dont switch to nerest AP.
Iam complete beginner with mikrotik and its probable that its my fault but i cant figure it out. Could someone push me in the right direction to toubleshoot?
Thanks
For this to work, radios need to be controlled using the same ROS instance and have proper FT settings applied.
So either 2.4 and 5ghz radios on the same ap, or capsman when looking at multiple APs.
Good that you have found the forum! More interesting information can be found on YouTube (though there is a lot of garbage on it as well). Make sure to follow MikorTik and have a lok at this video:
I did followed this video tutorial and have CAP connected to remote CAP on my Router. I created configurations for 2.4 and 5ghz and applied them on both AP and Router 2.4 and 5g (in total 4 wifi interfaces).
Configuration profile contains same security profile, i set just Country, band, chanel width, skip DFS channels to 10 min cac, enabled FT and FT over DS as was in the default profile. Client device that iam trying to connect is my phone Galaxy S20 FE. If i turn off and on wifi it connect to correct AP but when i leave it connected and go as far as signal of the AP reach even thou iam almost nexto to another AP and the original has almost no signal any more it stays connected to this with poor quality.
It’s important to keep in mind that in WiFi roaming decissions are entirely up to station (wireless client device). Whatever one configures on AP (e.g. CAPsMAN with FT) only helps station to make (hopefully) better decission. And sad fact is that some (notably a bit older) devices tend to make poor decissions. Mobility extensions (802.11 r/k/v) are fairly recent additiobs to standard and implementation follows with some delay (and, again, qusljty of implementation varies). Your Galaxy S20 is a bit aged in this respect, so I wouldn’t expect it to eork as well as some more recent devices.
If a wifi device doesn’t support the mobility extensions, then it behaves the way you see: it stays connected to same AP as long as possible and then reconnects to another AP (preferrably with same BSSID) … and this is much lenghtier process than roaming/FT (hence the aversity to changing APs too often).
There’s a “trick” to make station move to another AP sooner: create ACLs which reject/disconnect stations with poorer signal strengths. This, however, comes with a few drawbacks, ranging from frequent reconnections which are disturbing to the traffic, having device lingering between two APs not being able to connect to neither due to poor signal from both APs involved … and to device simply refusing to connect to same SSID ever again due to being forcibly disconnected too many times. To make things worse, the behaviour depends both on properly selected values (not exactly trivial task) and on client device itself (again).
It’s worth to point out that also in this scenario all the decissions are again made by station with exception of decission to (forcibly) drop the connection from AP’s side.
Personally I’d advise against implementing this “trick” unless wifi admin knows how to thoroughly test the resulting setup to avoid the drawbacks.