I'm quite new to wlan on mikrotik. Although, I've been using mikrotiks as routers for three years.

Now, what wouuld be the best practice for covering a large office area with wlan using mikrotiks?

The current setup in the office is two Cisco AP541N set as clustered. Now one of the ciscos has turned so unstable that it has to be rebooted several times a day. So I though this would be the time to try mikrotiks wlan.

I can't find anything in the router os that looks like a cluster functionality. Does it exist, or is this kind of setup solved in another way?

I tried to setup two boxes with the same SSID and have them on the same frequency. Now it turns out that computers moving from one area to the other, doesn't switch to the other access point. So I tried them on two different frequencies, but then computers seems to prefer the AP on the highest frequency even when being at a spot where it barely has any coverage. The result is that users experience lots of packetloss.

So, how is an area supposed to be covered by multiple mikrotik accesspoints?

What type of coverage?

Are we talking ISP situation or wireless LAN?

I've got a little of both. With both I use the same SSID and encryption. I actually has successful roaming today while using a dynamic IP. Never had that work before.

It wlan for a company.

Using the same ssid and encryption doesn't work very well here. How did you make it work?
Are you using the same frequency on both AP's?
Does the coverage areas overlap? (I'm thinking, maybe turn the sender power down, so that the AP's get less overlapping area will make things better?)
How many devices are connected on wlan? (Counting for laptops, mobile phones, ipads, ... I got about 40 devices here.)

The motel has 50 to 75 rooms, usually pretty busy, figure on smart phones, laptops, etc... its under a pretty decent load.

I have them all set the same, alternating between channel 1 and channel 11. Three have omni and 2 have panel antennas. The owner had some issues and a few complaints so I did a site survey yesterday, streaming music while pinging the edge router while walking through and checking the signal strength in the rooms, even in the closets behind the rooms, just to be sure.

It jumped from AP1 to AP4 to AP5 and back to AP1 while walking and at worst dropped one ping. AP1, 2 and 3 are within 150ft of each other, AP4 and 5 are 200+ ft away from AP1-3 and ~70ft apart themselves.

AP's were running 3.30 and 4.17 at the time, client is Windows XP Pro with an Atheros 9280 802.11n card, Windows wireless config handling the wifi control.

Then there must be something I've missed in the wireless configuration. Do you remember what you changed from default? Which routerboard/wlan card did you use?

What are your clients? Roaming is mostly client dependent.

I have RB433, RB411 with R52H and the RB411AR 2.4GHz as AP's.

They are set as AP Bridge, all interfaces are bridged in this case, DHCP server is configured on the 433 which is connected to the Internet. Nothing fancy. WPA AES encryption. Most of the time I've had issues where the client would hang on to an AP until it lost signal before jumping to the next. This time it just hopped to the next AP once the signal was stronger. Once the signal from AP1 was about -75, AP4 was about -73, laptop just connected to the strongest signal.

For one, don't reuse the channel if the two AP's can see each other in a scan with anything better than a -85 or so. A scan from AP1 shows AP3 around -80, so AP3 is set to channel 11. AP1 and AP4 scans show around a -90, but as they are close to line of sight (only one interior wall and one exterior wall) I used channel 11 on AP4 and channel 1 on AP5, which can only see AP4 and just barely read AP2 and 3.

I have a Compex WLE200NX in my laptop. That may be the biggest difference.

ok

Thanks for advices. I'll keep testing the next time I'm onsite. The laptops here are using various intel cards. N6230 i my laptop.