Hi All,
I’m new to Mesh networking but understood it can improve the user experience a lot. I’ve a harbour area with about 14 MikroTik WIFI access points, all of them have a UTP cable connection and are setup as individual AP’s. Can I change this network into a Mesh network to get better user experience? Which guideline do I need to follow to configure Mesh on a cabled AP network? I’ve seen some Mesh guidelines but those situations are not for cabled AP’s. Any support would be appreciated. Thanks.
Cheers.
Anybody able to provide feedback on my above question? How to setup a Mesh network with wired connected AP’s?
Nobody is answering because the question doesn’t make sense. From Wikipedia:
A mesh refers to rich interconnection among devices or nodes. Wireless mesh networks often consist of mesh clients, mesh routers and gateways. Mobility of nodes is less frequent. If nodes constantly or frequently move, the mesh spends more time updating routes than delivering data. In a wireless mesh network, topology tends to be more static, so that routes computation can converge and delivery of data to their destinations can occur. Hence, this is a low-mobility centralized form of wireless ad hoc network.
A wired mesh is “richly interconnected,” meaning that the APs have to have multiple ethernet ports. You don’t say what model APs you have, but chances are good that they don’t. A wired mesh might give you some advantage in fault tolerance, e.g., an AP could survive a cut cable to the central router, but won’t improve transmission characteristics.
A wireless mesh is slower and less efficient than the cables you already have, and actually robs bandwidth from the end-user devices to spend on chattiness. Conventionally-routed, cabled networks are generally superior to wireless ad-hoc networks.
In short, I’m not sure what benefit you envisioned from venturing into mesh networking, but given that you’ve already done the cabling job, I can’t see any benefit to introducing it in your configuration.
If you’re looking for wireless handoff of connections between APs as watercraft move around (roaming), that’s a different issue entirely.
Thanks macsrwe for your feedback. Maybe due to limited knowledge i’ve asked the question incorrectly, sorry.
Indeed, I want to do something like roaming, I still have a feeling that clients stay connected to an AP that doesn’t have the strongest signal. I want clients when they move around to connect to the strongest signal AP. Hope this explanation is more clear. How can this be achieved?
FYI, I’m having about 12 Mikrotik wAP ac installed through wires.
I’m not an authority on roaming. From what I’ve gathered from some threads I’ve read, there are three networking standards that have to be implemented to achieve seamless roaming, and MikroTik has implemented (I think) part of two and none of the third.
I would recommend you search this forum for the terms roaming and 802.11 and read recent threads.