As I move from one room where I have an excellent reception from AP 1 to another room where I have an excellent reception from AP 2 (and shitty from AP 1) my client device (iOS) appears disconnected from WiFi (per its indication) for a couple of seconds. I suspect this timeout is somehow tied to the Allow Signal Out Of Range timeout, but I don’t know enough 802.11 to be sure.
Before my APs were configured with CAPsMAN and IIRC it worked better. Does CAPsMAN magically helps seamless switching, e.g. releasing the device sooner?
On AP 1 I have an access list around signal-strength: allow auth in -85..120, disallow auth in -120..-86. The idea was to let the device switch to AP 2 sooner as I transition between rooms.
Hi,
Sadly mikrotik wifi solution is very weak no matter what u do will face 0.5second to 2sec when u switch over from AP to AP its very prominent and u ll see a reconnecting screen for 1-2 sec while u are in any call
u can optimize it but cannot completely avoid it as mikoritk doesnot support 802.11 k/v/r upto my knowledge(correct me if iam wrong) and mikrotik havent implemented wpa3 (it is a separate thing) though yet.
seen lot of posts complaining about issues in client devices connected with wifi ap of mikrotik.
AP handover on Mikrotik is super slow because ROS doesn’t support any roaming extensions to 802.11 protocol.
So clients basically do full reconnect on handover, this usually means full association and DHCP request etc. as if it was completely new network.
Some clients may be little bit more clever, but in general it’s slow.
And there is nothing you can do about it, no amount of tweaking of parameters will do anything.
Only thing that may help is to document your case and send it to Mikrotik support, so they know yet another customer wants roaming to work better.
But so far nothing have changed for decades!
Most clients skip the DHCP part if they are associating to different AP serving same SSID as the previously connected AP … so remaining within same ESSID which means within same (wireless) LAN a.k.a. L2 network … hence no need for re-acquiring L3 identification which should be still valid.
Unless client plays smart by randomizing MAC address used, then it needs to get fresh IP address but added delay is device’s choice.