Seamlessly blanketing the house (zero-handoff roaming AC wireless)

I've been tasked with blanketing a house in glorious wifi. Layout might look something like this: cable modem in the basement, wired to a router/WAP on the first floor, which is also wired to a WAP upstairs. The sticking point has commonly been getting client devices to relinquish their hold on an inferior connection as they move about the house.

Is there a solution for this? Do both WAPs need to support said solution, or is one good enough? I can't seem to get good information about Ubiquiti stuff. I'm hoping for AC...

From what I've read here, the answer appears to be "eventually, probably" and that's a bit of a bummer.

Very much depends on the characteristics of client devices.

1) There is an add-on to IEEE 802.11 to define methods to do fast handoffs. Let's define "fast"... for VoIP on WiFi, fast is < 0.2 second (200 msSec). For uninterrupted video streaming to a handheld thing (that's a luxury), it's similar, or maybe 100mSec), depending on the buffer sizes.

2) The biggest problem is simpler... having the pedestrian handheld thing choose the "best" Access Point (AP) rather than first-heard. And "best" meaning the one with the strongest signal. This is the bug-a-boo with clients.

Most WiFi client devices will stay with the current AP even when its signal is much weaker than a now nearby AP due to client mobility.

A professional ($$$) managed WiFi system will do all the above, but with proprietary means and special collaborating software on the client device.

Lots of anecdotes on this forum, but I think it's a unpredictable. A user in the loop to manually choose best AP when moving to a new room for a long duration works with all clients. But you'll need to use a different SSID on each AP, and an SSID name that suggests location, such as SmithLR, SmithMBR, and so on.

So, (2) is the first challenge. No consumer grade solution that I know of is assured to work with all sorts of clients. Some argue that Apple's WiFi with Apple clients works well. I have doubts.

+1 to Stevech's reply.

stevech said:

Some argue that Apple's WiFi with Apple clients works well. I have doubts.

Click to expand...

Airports do work quite nicely with any clients

one can do "lazy" roaming by careful AP location - the key thing is to find the handover trigger points - many folks in a multiple AP environment place the AP's too close together, so the devices never get to that threshold where they should start looking for other AP's that have the same BSSID...

My experience is that the trigger to start looking is around -70 dB RSSI, and HO candidate AP's should be around -8 to -12 dB stronger than the incumbent AP that the client is currently on...

This would be similar for 5G to 5G or 5G to 2.4G hand ups or hand downs...

You could use RADIUS authentication since it reduces the amount of steps in connecting to an AP as long as the server is on wire.
You would also need to reduce the client's roaming aggressiveness setting from the default 3 to 2 or 1 so it doesnt aggressively change APs if you are in a zone where 4 APs have similar signals.

How much is $$$?

A top goal is to support client devices that are bad at switching with no configuration changes. Some devices are better than others at this, and I'd like the bad ones to behave in spite of themselves.

Basically, I'm trying to outfit my sis with a network that "just works" in her house and will not require future tinkering. Custom firmware on the router/WAP to reduce power output is not something I want to deal with if I can just throw money at hardware instead.

I disagree on the video streaming unless it is video chat. Netflix, Amazon prime and youtube are all pretty tolerant of slow handoff. Their buffers all are typically several seconds deep as is most local streaming I have tried (iTunes and SMB streaming). VOIP and video chat are the only ones that seem intolerant of slow transfers and it depends on the service. You'll drop voice/video in all of them, but Facetime is the only one I have experience that is full on crud for slow hand-off. It'll either disconnect on a handoff or it'll degrade audio and video for 15-60 seconds during and after a handoff.

Skype and several VOIP products I have tried do not do that (at worse, you'll get a half second or second drop in audio/video and possibly degraded video quality with Skype for 2-4 seconds after handoff).

I have a few TP-Link routers running as access points and most of my stuff works really well. It is about layout and proper router settings more than anything. Separate floors is going to help here. Going up a step in antenna gain and then reducing radio power on the router/access points is going to help more, because it creates better defined zones of coverage. So if you routers have, for example, 5dBi antennas, swapping on 7dBi, but dropping 2.4GHz radio power from high to medium or low is a good idea (shouldn't need to tinker with 5GHz radio power as penetration is already fairly low on it).

Facetime is the only issue I have with my setup. Every other application seems to work really well and the clients are all pretty good with roaming appropriately (mix of iOS, Android and Windows clients).

you can reduce power output with stock firmware too. Basic ones give you 3 choices of low,medium, high while more expensive sophisticated ones like asus give you a slider and some custom firmwares let you type in a value.