Problems Setting up multiple wifi access points in my house with seamless transition.

[fantasie]

At home i have two wifi access points. one is the main at&t uverse modem router and it's connected to another older at&t router with DHCP turned off. I had hoped I could set up something that allowed me to pass seamlessly from one access point to the other if I got out of range of one by giving them the same name and whatnot (followed guides to set the ips of both routers to be different, etc.) But it wouldn't work. So I named them differently and got them to work albiet clunkily.

The problem is that if you want to switch from one connection to the other you have forget the connection (or turn of the auto connect) and, then, either restart your device or turn on and off airplane mode (im guessing this resets the wifi card in the device). Then if I try to connect to the other connection it will be successful. If I don't do all the steps I just mentioned, it will never let me connect to the other connection. It'll just get stuck and loop at 'connecting..., taking longer than usual' bla bla and then say unable to connect and pop back to the original connection.

I read some posts that you are not supposed to/can't make this work, but I don't believe it. That's because at my University the whole campus has wifi and is all under the same name and I can pass from one connection to another seamlessly. How do I implement that in my home?! It would be awesome!

 

[adamwinn]

At your university, they are using Wi-Fi Controllers which allow 'L2 Fast Roaming'. Basically your device is pre-authenticated by the surrounding APs, so moving around is easy.

On your home device you won't ever get the same level of performance but you can get close. The first thing to do would be to increase the Roaming Aggressiveness of your network adapter. This will cause it to automatically 'leave' the distant network when you get closer to the other network.

 

[fantasie]

At your university, they are using Wi-Fi Controllers which allow 'L2 Fast Roaming'. Basically your device is pre-authenticated by the surrounding APs, so moving around is easy.

On your home device you won't ever get the same level of performance but you can get close. The first thing to do would be to increase the Roaming Aggressiveness of your network adapter. This will cause it to automatically 'leave' the distant network when you get closer to the other network.

I see, but even if I set it to switch more aggressively it won't be able to, because of the situation described in my original post in the second paragraph.

 

[adamwinn]

At your university, they are using Wi-Fi Controllers which allow 'L2 Fast Roaming'. Basically your device is pre-authenticated by the surrounding APs, so moving around is easy.

On your home device you won't ever get the same level of performance but you can get close. The first thing to do would be to increase the Roaming Aggressiveness of your network adapter. This will cause it to automatically 'leave' the distant network when you get closer to the other network.

I see, but even if I set it to switch more aggressively it won't be able to, because of the situation described in my original post in the second paragraph.

If it's getting stuck and looping at 'connecting...' then there is some incompatibility with the overall system. Sometimes this is the network drivers, other times it's the bios of the wireless access points. There's no guarantee that it can be fixed though.

I highly suggest looking at Ubiquiti. The access points are not very expensive, it would be a significant upgrade in quality, and you can get zero-handoff roaming without investing in a hardware controller
http://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap/

 

[fantasie]

At your university, they are using Wi-Fi Controllers which allow 'L2 Fast Roaming'. Basically your device is pre-authenticated by the surrounding APs, so moving around is easy.

On your home device you won't ever get the same level of performance but you can get close. The first thing to do would be to increase the Roaming Aggressiveness of your network adapter. This will cause it to automatically 'leave' the distant network when you get closer to the other network.

I see, but even if I set it to switch more aggressively it won't be able to, because of the situation described in my original post in the second paragraph.

If it's getting stuck and looping at 'connecting...' then there is some incompatibility with the overall system. Sometimes this is the network drivers, other times it's the bios of the wireless access points. There's no guarantee that it can be fixed though.

I highly suggest looking at Ubiquiti. The access points are not very expensive, it would be a significant upgrade in quality, and you can get zero-handoff roaming without investing in a hardware controller
http://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap/

I will look into that, thank you for all the help! ^_^