I’m upgrading a tower from a single omni to three sector antennas. I understand I need to run the antennas on different frequencies, but should I be running them with the same SSID or different SSIDs? My preference would be to be able to run them with the same SSID so that some subscribers could automatically fail over to one of the other antennas in case of failure, but I suspect that there’s a negative to this that I may not be thinking of.
(I know I could have the CPEs seek multiple SSIDs if they were Mikrotiks, but they’re older, legacy radios that don’t have this capability.)
if one sector goes down, users could connect to other two
sectors are most likely facing different directions, so this is probably moot
same ssid cons:
after some days you can find all user connectd to only one sector
again, different directions but yes, you may see clients on the wrong sector which is worse than just oversubscribing because those customers service level has probably dropped substantially due to lower gain on the off-direction sector.
I would suggest different SSID for each radio when building a hub & spoke style wireless distribution.
In certain directions, there is significant overlap between sectors, especially since there is about 60° that we don’t cover at all (it’s wilderness). So many customers have signal from two sectors, often both better than they are getting from the current omni. And while I agree that service from the “wrong” sector will be degraded, if the alternative is no service at all because the “right” sector is down, this would seem to be a win-win. The CPEs involved all have “Prefer BSSID” functionality, so they should migrate back onto the right sector when it becomes available (at worst I may have to reach out and goose them).
I’ve done it, same SSID and use the access list to control which CPE connects to which AP. Some customers that are close connect to which ever has best signal at the time. It makes it easy to work on stuff if you can make changes to 1 sector while letting the other customers connect to the other sectors.
On a previous network I ran, I did same SSID across the network and used MAC ACL to control the connections as needed. This simplified installation and management considerably. All CPE’s were setup at the office. This simplified the installers’ jobs.
Sometimes, when an AP is down, the CPE will connect to another AP it can reach with considerable low signal strength. But this is better than no internet at all.
I wonder if one could write a script that does the following on the CPE-device:
If the registration is not from the main-AP (checked by MAC-Adress of the AP it is connected to),
then drop the connection after one hour of connection-uptime. Afterward let the CPE reconnect again.
If the registration is bound to the correct AP, then simply let it run and do nothing
This will ensure, that the wireless registration will move to the correct AP, when it is available again.
Otherwis it will have reconnects on a one hour schedule on the ‘wrong’ AP.
A question for the guys that know high sites and ssid’s. My problem is as follows, I have to 2 VAP on on distribution and what to run distribution on nv2 so I locked into client router to change it’s ssid to the another so that i can disable the 1 vap and that langer on change master interface to same ssid. after changing client ssid they dropped from high side and not coming back. What can be the problem?
Since your issue isn’t more than vaguely related to the subject of this thread, you would do better posting your question in a new thread of your own, with a subject line more likely to attract people with specific knowledge about your problem area.
You’ll wan’t to always know which tower your CPE’s are connected to. Always. Roaming is not really looking for a better TX signal, so it might roam to an AP that barely receives the CPE but CPE may hear AP really well. It will stay there and won’t roam to the better TX path (where RX may be lower). Also, how do you know which way the CPE is pointing when you hear it on X towers. Going with same SSID is a giant mess to clean up later.
Use other mechanisms to handle any failover/roaming could be beneficial but
