Wifi extender issues when switching

[Moonchance]

Greetings,

I live in a house with two floors and currently have my main Internet router downstairs. I'm having fiber optics with speeds up to 20Mbps. My house has thick stone and conrete structure, making it hard for the wifi router to penetrate with its signals through walls or upstairs.

I Have a Belkin wifi extender to help solve this problem, and grant me connection upstairs as well. After setting up the wifi extender in a location where it gets half of the bars from the main router downstairs, I managed to get a somewhat stabilized connection from the extender upstairs. Due to previous connection issues, I gave the extender a different SSID than the main router, comparative to "wifi" and "wifi 2", both with the same wpa password.

The issue still at hand is that when going upstairs to connect to "wifi 2" instead of "wifi", I get connected to "wifi 2" but have no internet connection. The only thing I can do which works 80% of the time is to forget the connection, turn off wifi on my device completely, turn wifi back on and connect to "wifi 2" to get access to Internet. The same happens when going downstairs and switch wifi connection from "wifi 2" to "wifi". This happens with all my devices and have to go through the same procedure no matter device; msi laptop, Samsung Galaxy smartphone or iPad mini.

Could someone shed a light on what the problem could be?

 

[RealBeast]

Current consumer routers do not provide seamless roaming, particularly evident when you have signal strength issues as in your situation.

Devices (i.e. phones, etc.) control which radio they connect to and until the devices *and* routers/APs support 802.11k, r, v (like many Apple devices do already when used on equipped enterprise level wireless equipment) true seamless roaming is mostly luck that your device decides to drop the weaker radio for the stronger, and that it would happen quickly without noticing is even greater luck. (Many high end enterprise products fake it by forcing devices off to the next radio though, and that works with most devices.)

Currently, I am not aware of any consumer level routers/APs and few devices that provide such support.

 

[Moonchance]

Not sure I understand your answer.

Both connections work well when they do work. It is just that on all my devices, I have to forget network, shut down wifi, turn wifi back on and connect to the nearest wifi on them, everytime I go upstairs and downstairs. This on all devices (laptop, phone and ipad).

 

[RealBeast]

Sorry, I was trying to explain why the change won't be seamless, but you probably can improve the change.

You have two different wireless SSIDs and the devices are staying attached to the first radio that they connect with and do not drop that for a different SSID if they can still detect a signal (even too weak to really use) from the original radio.

You can try using the same SSID on each and you may get them to automatically disconnect from one when you move away from it to the other. That should happen when the initial signal is very weak if you have the automatically connect box checked. If they do move to the new radio you may have to refresh the page connection as it may time out during the radio change.

You may need to delete the old network SSID that you change from each device, but you should not have to forget the first radio to connect to the second if they use the same SSID and security key.

 

[Moonchance]

The same SSID I had from the beginning did not allow me to manually switch to the wifi I wanted (ground floor and second floor). Eventually I want to be able to manually switch between the two rather than letting my devices detect the stronger one automatically. I would like to go upstairs and manually switch to the upstairs SSID without having to forget network and completily restart the wifi in my devices each time.

 

[RealBeast]

Sorry but you have to forget the old radio if it's still detected because the devices try to keep the chosen connection when you use different SSIDs. Consumer routers that will do what you want are still a few years away. They will use the protocols that I mentioned in my first post.