Hi all, I'm trying to set up seamless roaming between 3 routers, either Belkin RT3200 or Linksys E8450 (essentially the same routers). They are all WiFi 6, with two radios each, 2.4ghz and 5ghz. Router A is the "main" router connected to the internet. Router B is connected to Router A (I followed this guide for setting up a wireless repeater.) Now I want to set up Router C to connect to Router B.
From what I gather, the best way is to set up Router A with SSIDs on both radios. Router B should connect wirelessly to one of those SSIDs, with the other radio providing its own SSID. And Router C will connect to Router B's SSID, and provide its own SSID on the other radio. My questions:
Should ALL SSIDs have the exact same name and security settings, and also the same channels, for optimal seamless roaming? Or should 2.4ghz and 5ghz radio SSIDs be different?
When going from Router A to B to C with this setup, it would be switching from 2.4ghz to 5ghz back to 2.4ghz on router C. Would this be a problem?
I read about band steering as a way to make seamless transitions. Is this recommended?
Are there any other considerations when setting this up, to make it more reliable?
Any guides/references would also be appreciated, as most OpenWrt wireless repeating guides don't include this information.
You want a dumb AP configuration on router B and C. You will use the same SSID and password for all APs.
In most cases, it's good to have both 5GHz and 2.4GHz radios with the same SSID -- this way the client devices can switch as needed in general.
Then, from a baseline dumb AP configuration, you'll want to tune each radio -- channels and power levels (as well as physical placement). I like this video as a good explainer about how to do that.
Only after you've done that should you experiment with 802.11k/v/r or band steering/usteer. I'd actually recommend not using these standards in general -- they're not really needed in most cases. But if you want to try, you'll need to make sure the radios are optimized first.
Thank you for the reply. Good to know about using the same SSID for all radios no matter the frequency. I'll follow the tuning guide. Maybe I'll look into the k/v/r and band steering if performance isn't good enough with the basic setup.
I'm wondering, is the setup of Router C to B literally identical as B to A? The gateways and DNS points to Router A just the same, and the SSID is the same. So it'll connect to Router B if that's the one that is available, right?
By default, if you scan the wifi to connect to an existing BSSID, it will add the MAC address of the AP interface you're connecting to into the wireless configuration (meaning it'll lock onto that exact AP MAC) - which is sensible, but that should be the only real difference (depending on the device, the MAC addresses of your own AP interfaces might also be included into the file).
Ideally it isn't (unless you intentionally want to override it), because it is correctly read from flash via DTS/ nvmem handlers - but there are some cases where extracting the correct MAC address isn't quite that easy, so it can't be done properly at boot time and ends up in the wireless configuration (effectively abusing the manual override). Not the norm, but it happens.