I had this hypothesis the other day - I want to allow my clients to freely auto-select the proper tower based on signal, interference, without relying on a disconnect to trigger a roam It came to me because I was testing the nearby cities nice fiber-backhauled Tropos network (all channel 6), which very nicely works without dropping my wireless card, or waiting for the signal to finally die out like my multi-channel network does. Up until last week, I had been using 1,6,11 on all my multi-sector towers, in such a way that for the most part I never set the same channel on any AP aimed in the same direction.
Well, I had this idea, stemming from a concept that WDS allows clients to roam effectively. Well, WDS is bad in the sense of repeating, because of the bandwidth loss. But all my towers are backhauled, so I never needed to repeat with it.
Then the idea came to me, why not use WDS without bridging the new WDS interface. So I set all my towers to be on channel 1, WDS mode dynamic, default bridge=none. So far, I still sit at home and stream music, talk on the VOIP phone, while playing on the internet (over my WISP network). So the network works well, in fact I’m getting B speed tests at 3-4Mbps, 1.25 miles from the tower.
It’s just a test still but I think using WDS without repeating may have some benefits.
Any thoughts to this idea?