Wifi setup in house

[lightning968]

So today I hooked up 3 routers in my 8,000 square ft home. There is wall jacks that go to a isp hub at the bottom floor. I connected one in every area. I then set all of the gateways to the same and set the SSID and Passcode to the same on all the routers. How is this possible? When you walk around the home your phone automatically selects the router nearest and there is never a bad connection. Also, the Wifi area in iOS settings showed just one SSID instead of every router even though they were all in range. None are set up as access points, all as individual routers but they seems to all correspond somehow as they are under a single SSID and Gateway. I just need an explaination on how the routers worked together when configured as a regular router, not as extenders or access points.

 

[BFG-9000]

Many devices are reluctant to switch to another, stronger AP unless signal is actually lost, because of the 10 seconds or so it takes to switch over. There are apps for phones and roaming aggressiveness settings for laptops to help with this.

The routers should just work if you've only used the LAN ports, although unless they are assigned different IP addresses it may prove difficult to pull up their configuration pages when all are attached. They should even work if you used the WAN port and they are on different subnets, only then it would be in double-NAT and some programs like VOIP will require some tinkering and opening of ports to get working. So it's generally better to configure them as APs.

Note that Layer 2 devices like APs just work with everything like IPv6 and don't actually need their own IP address on the subnet to work (only to reach their configuration pages). Once you toss in Layer 3 functions like routing, things can get much more complicated.

 

[lightning968]

It is the same subnet. They are all TP-Link routers with the same LAN IP. All I did was do a quick setup, then plug them in to different areas. All of the routers have the ethernet going from the wall to the Internet jack in it. DNS is enabled on every router. It is just interesting that they are all connected to the same network hub but all work together even though the LAN is the same and the ethernet is in the internet slot of the router. In order to get to the router config page, I just go near the desired router.

 

[bill001g]

If you are using the devices as router and are using the WAN port on the routers you actually have different networks/subnets. It will be made much worse if you use the same lan ip on all the routers. You will have lots of issues automatically switching. There are 2 parts to this. There is the wireless part which you can force to switch or it will do it on its own sometimes. Then you have the IP part. In many cases the wireless part of the machine will switch but the outage will not be enough for the pc to decide it needs to request a new ip address. You now take the chance that your machine is using a IP address assigned to another machine on the other lan. It will work if you get lucky and the ip is not being used.

You really should change your design to run as AP. The switching itself is enough of a headache to deal with