I am looking for TRUE Seamless Wifi Roaming

[gregkinney]

I have a large residential wifi project that will likely need 3-4 AP's. When a user is walking through the house on an android device, I do not want it to disconnect as it roams from one AP to another, even if it's for a millisecond. It is a smart home and the small disconnects are causing issues.

We originally put in an Apple Airport Extreme and 3 airport expresses. Coverage was great but there was the slight disconnect when roaming from one AP to another.

The second try was Ubiquiti AP's but their zero handoff feature causes more problems than it fixes. Outside of that, their AP's are fantastic and about the best bang for your buck on the market, but they will still have quick disconnects when roaming from one AP to another.

I am not familiar with enterprise wifi applications. Will a system with, say, a Cisco controller and some Cisco AP's achieve what I am looking for? Will the controller do the handoffs so the device never disconnects?

What about Open-Mesh? These devices are super affordable and appear to do what I am looking for, but I haven't seen it specifically say that I will not experience any slight drop when roaming AP's. Anyone with experience using Open-Mesh?

Thanks so much in advance for your expertise and advice!

 

[bill001g]

You will always get a tiny disconnect no matter what....it just depends how hard you are looking. I suppose you could run with no encryption and that would get rid of it. The problem is they keys for the session use the mac address of the ap as part of the key so you have to renegotiate these keys. It is a few ms but there is always a slight delay.

Cisco is the leader in this area. Theirs is the closest to true seamless as you can get. It will even tolerate changes of ip and can be made to move to even cell networks and back...that still glitches it a bit though.

Cisco has lots of white papers on the generic topic called ip mobility that includes the wifi hand off issues.

Problem is the controller that does this and the AP that work with it are outrageously expensive. Think many thousands of dollars.

It has been a while since I have used the cisco platform so I do not know what the current system does but they still offer this feature. I know for best results you could load client software so the main controller could tell the end device to move similar to a cell tower.

HP used to have something similar but it was not as comprehensive....but still costs a huge amount for their controller.

We used to do this to try to allow people to use VoIP phones and walk around with them. It worked but everyone now wants only carry the cell and not 2 devices. Since you can get micro cells inside the building and the costs of cell time is much better we kinda stopped worrying about seamless roaming. Other than a voice call where it causes great issues management decided people would have to live with a 1-2 second hand over and save the money not paying cisco a yearly fee.

 

[gregkinney]

You will always get a tiny disconnect no matter what....it just depends how hard you are looking. I suppose you could run with no encryption and that would get rid of it. The problem is they keys for the session use the mac address of the ap as part of the key so you have to renegotiate these keys. It is a few ms but there is always a slight delay.

Cisco is the leader in this area. Theirs is the closest to true seamless as you can get. It will even tolerate changes of ip and can be made to move to even cell networks and back...that still glitches it a bit though.

Cisco has lots of white papers on the generic topic called ip mobility that includes the wifi hand off issues.

Problem is the controller that does this and the AP that work with it are outrageously expensive. Think many thousands of dollars.

It has been a while since I have used the cisco platform so I do not know what the current system does but they still offer this feature. I know for best results you could load client software so the main controller could tell the end device to move similar to a cell tower.

HP used to have something similar but it was not as comprehensive....but still costs a huge amount for their controller.

We used to do this to try to allow people to use VoIP phones and walk around with them. It worked but everyone now wants only carry the cell and not 2 devices. Since you can get micro cells inside the building and the costs of cell time is much better we kinda stopped worrying about seamless roaming. Other than a voice call where it causes great issues management decided people would have to live with a 1-2 second hand over and save the money not paying cisco a yearly fee.

Thank you so much for your help. It looks like I will just make due with what I have. It would be worth the cost of enterprise equipment if I could avoid the drop but it would not be worth it to change the drop from 500 milliseconds to 50 milliseconds. I will do another site survey and make the best with this Ubiquiti equipment (which I really do like).