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URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Indoor Wi-Fi Roaming with OpenWRT
rubenbe wrote 29 min ago:
I'm developing opensoho as a central controller for SOHO OpenWrt
setups. I've recently added support for usteer and I did notice a
significant drop in wireless clients with a bad connection.
URI [1]: https://github.com/rubenbe/opensoho
MiracleRabbit wrote 59 min ago:
With Wi-Fi 8 we will finally get steerable friendly roaming like
cellular radio is doing for almost 40 years now.
This "here's a neighbor table, disassoc and fuck you&good luck"-method
we must use right now is just super painful. It's super complicated to
build reliable networks that way.
geeunits wrote 1 hour 23 min ago:
Warning all, the website has a hidden prompt injection in the footer.
drnick1 wrote 1 hour 32 min ago:
I still like the TP-Link E610 (flashed to OpenWRT) better. They are
more compact and presumably more durable than "residential" devices. I
also dislike anything that has "mesh" in its name.
To me at least, the gold standard for a large home is a standalone
cable modem or ONT connected to an x86 PC that serves as home server
and router, and as many ceiling mounted APs as necessary to ensure good
WiFi coverage. No cloud, apps, or proprietary software anywhere. With
such a networking backbone it is also easy to integrate self-hosted
security cameras and other appropriately hacked IoT devices.
tra3 wrote 1 hour 39 min ago:
Question for the wifi experts in this thread...
What's a good off the shelf multipoint wifi system these days? I have
Amazon's Eero right now and it's ok.
I'd love to go back to my linksys wrt54 roots but that's not in the
cards currently..
downrightmike wrote 24 min ago:
ubiquity
bobbob1921 wrote 1 hour 53 min ago:
I do a lot of work on very large Wi-Fi networks (i.e. hotel/apartment
complexes with 80 to 500+ access points), for a very rough quick test
of coverage quality and roaming performance, find a Ping app for your
phone that allows you to set a super low interval (i.e. time between
pings sent), and ping your gateway router (i.e. 192.168.1.1) and while
that is running walk around your home/location.
Itâs important that the Ping app keeps sending pings even if they
drop, i.e. it should just look like a waterfall/constant stream of fast
pings that show you red/green pings and ideally a summary at the end.
On iOS the app I tell people to use is called âPingâ with a blue
icon, I usually have to share the link to the app as there are several
with this name (Iâm not on my phone currently or I would share the
link) there are several ping apps that do offer this fast ping feature.
raj_db_dev wrote 2 hours 2 min ago:
Curious if you think usteer is viable without wired backhaul. I have
two OpenWRT routers in different rooms in differnt part of the house
and not possible to connect them by ethernet. Would the usteer overhead
make things worse if they're just communicating over wifi?
acidburnNSA wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
I spent a long time recently setting pretty much this same thing up.
When in my office my Android phone battery rapidly died, I guess
because usteer kept trying to steer it or something. I ended up turning
off usteer and 802.11r and just deal with slow roaming. Maybe I should
try again with the static neighbor reports.
goodbirb wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
99% of what he did is not needed. Only 2 things are needed: enable fast
roaming (FT), and change DTIM from the openwrt default of 2, to 3.
That's all. No need to install usteer, extra hostapd fields. Nothing.
By lucky chance, while he set up usteer, he modified DTIM to 3 thus
fixing the fast transition roaming, which doesn't work well on default
openwrt because of DTIM. Especially Apple devices really hate DTIM=2
(they need the extra off-time given by DTIM to properly scan the other
channels).
rcarmo wrote 1 hour 6 min ago:
Actually, no. DTIM was always 3, if you'd bothered to read the
original post - [1] I do know what Apple devices "like" (it's kind of
my thing, hence the domain name).
URI [1]: https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/09/14/1630
TimTheTinker wrote 2 hours 16 min ago:
Not to be that guy, but...
If you want multiple SSIDs, roaming, daily neighbor scanning and auto
channel selection, etc, but don't like to spend hours tinkering with
your equipment beyond the physical setup, then Ubiquiti UniFi equipment
is great.
I stopped recommending UniFi around 2020 (several of their best
engineers had left, and they made some dumb choices), but IMO they're
back to being a decent choice. And I appreciate that they're become a
one-stop solution for all home/SOHO as well as mid size enterprise IT
needs.
rcarmo wrote 1 hour 9 min ago:
Ubiquity would have added another zero (at least) to the price here
and bring cloud features I very determinedly did not want to have in
the first place (check the original post at [1] ).
This wasn't hours of tweaking. Well, over almost a year, maybe two
hours, but no more than that.
URI [1]: https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/09/14/1630
bdavbdav wrote 1 hour 17 min ago:
Yep exactly. This stuff quickly falls into âchoose your battlesâ
for me, and Iâd rather just offload the issue
rcarmo wrote 1 hour 2 min ago:
As long as you're happy with having your home wi-fi potentially
controlled by the cloud...
wwweeee wrote 2 hours 57 min ago:
Using only 6ghz, turned off 2.4 & 5. Problem solved.
Chihuahua0633 wrote 1 hour 18 min ago:
How's that working out for your IoT Devices?
lxgr wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
> The obvious advice for roaming is âuse one SSID everywhereâ, and
that is often correct if youâre running Wi-Fi in an office, a public
venue, or generally somewhere where you donât have (or care about)
legacy devices.
What difference does the presence of legacy devices make? Is the intent
to isolate them from modern devices from a network perspective? Then
create a separate SSID on both 2.4 and 5 GHz for modern devices.
I can't think of any legitimate reason for split SSIDs anymore. Linux
clients used to be pretty bad at preferring 5 over 2.4 GHz if RSSIs
were both excellent but 2.4 was slightly better, but I haven't seen
that in years.
esseph wrote 1 hour 21 min ago:
> I can't think of any legitimate reason for split SSIDs anymore.
Different networks / vlans / firewall rules.
lxgr wrote 31 min ago:
These are all not splits by frequency, though.
rcarmo wrote 2 hours 32 min ago:
There is zero benefit to using 2.4 for me, really, since it's crowded
as heck. I'd rather skip it altogether.
lxgr wrote 2 hours 26 min ago:
If you don't need it, of course, you might as well deactivate it.
But if you do, I don't see the point of having two different SSIDs
if you don't need them for another reason anyway.
rcarmo wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
I do need it, but the IoT devices are conveniently close to most
APs, so that sort of evens out.
thenthenthen wrote 3 hours 21 min ago:
Cool! I dont need this anymore since im broke and moved to a 1 room
apt. but yeah the âset the same ssidâ âtrickâ def. is not
enough and often achieves the opposite effect.
Jabdoa2 wrote 3 hours 23 min ago:
You can also "just" set the 802.11k entries manually. Add 802.11r and
you should be mostly good. Usteer makes it slightly better by moving
clients to the best AP when they stay stationary for longer whiles.
pickdan wrote 1 hour 26 min ago:
There is a pretty interesting option "nrsyncd" that uses UPNP rather
than having to add the 802.11k entries by hand/script. Seems to work
quite well, takes a few minutes to gather the information about the
other devices.
URI [1]: https://github.com/Fail-Safe/nrsyncd/blob/main/README.md
rcarmo wrote 2 hours 21 min ago:
Yeah, that is actually what the OpenWRT package does, except it grabs
the data for me. Saves me the scripting :)
ruptwelve wrote 3 hours 40 min ago:
When I move from Europe to the US I realized that roaming is not as
prevalent here as it is back home. The (mostly) wooden houses enable me
to just use one really powerful AP for most of my needs.
ghrl wrote 3 hours 40 min ago:
I don't quite understand the benefit of the setup. If there are legacy
IoT devices that need unique named 2.4G network, just broadcast another
SSID for them. So each router broadcasts main 5G (common name, fast
roam etc), main 2.4G (same as above) and legacy IoT 2.4G (with a
different name for each AP, and possibly worse encryption and maybe
even TKIP). That wouldn't hold back the network for legacy devices.
rcarmo wrote 2 hours 34 min ago:
I _am_ broadcasting a second SSID, in case that was not obvious from
the text... I just don't want there to be 3.
toast0 wrote 3 hours 20 min ago:
I run a single ssid dual band network ... what tends to happen is
5Ghz is effectively ignored. 2.4Ghz has better coverage, so
everything wants to live there. At least wifi 6 brought improved
encoding to 2.4Ghz.
I haven't had luck with the roaming extensions; when I run them, some
of my devices won't connect or won't stay connected and it's a pain
to monitor. I guess I could run a different SSID with roaming
enhancement, but effort.
neogodless wrote 9 min ago:
My current experience is that out of ~20 devices, about 6 are on
5Ghz and the rest choose 2.4Ghz. And it's basically perfect.
Because the 6 devices on 5Ghz: laptops and smartphones.
The rest are "smart" devices that work perfectly on 2.4Ghz.
Marsymars wrote 1 hour 4 min ago:
> I run a single ssid dual band network ... what tends to happen is
5Ghz is effectively ignored. 2.4Ghz has better coverage, so
everything wants to live there.
That hasn't been my experience at all. Checking my current network
status, I've got 24 devices connected to 5GHz and only two devices
(my two Nest Doorbells, for whatever reason) connected to 2.4GHz
that also supports 5GHz.
ssl-3 wrote 1 hour 36 min ago:
That's been my experience as well.
My workaround for part of that is using many SSIDs.
A. The SSID that covers both bands, in all areas
B. Two more SSIDs, one for each band -- again, used in all areas
C. Another SSID just for the AP in the garage (which also has A
and B SSIDs)
It has some advantages: I like being able to set a portable
device to SSID A. These things usually figure it out well-enough
while moving around. When someone visits and asks for wifi access,
I give them SSID A. It works; it's just not always perfectly
ideal.
It also prevents fixed devices in the garage from deciding to use
APs in the house; it never works well for them when that happens.
(The opposite problem hasn't been observed to be an issue yet.)
And it lets me decide whether any device is able to use 2.4 or
5GHz, in the usual way of having per-band SSIDs. If my TV streamer
weren't plugged in with ethernet, then I'd set it to use the
5GHz-only SSID.
---
A big downside is that it's ugly. Another is that the per-device
config is spread out amongst all of the devices instead of
centralized, but that's not so bad: I just make the SSID decision
at initial device setup and forget about it.
esseph wrote 1 hour 24 min ago:
This also impacts maximum throughout / performance. You want to
try at limit to 4 BSSIDs per AP, tops.
ssl-3 wrote 38 min ago:
I'm at 4.
What are the nuts-and-bolts reasons that would make 5 perform
worse?
lxgr wrote 3 hours 2 min ago:
This used to be pretty common on at least Linux and Android clients
some years ago.
Not sure if they finally got around to making the BSSID selection
algorithm a bit smarter or whether all my access points just
support active steering at this point, but I haven't seen this in
the past couple of years.
opan wrote 3 hours 13 min ago:
You can turn down the power on the 2.4GHz radio so it's not as
overpowering.
toast0 wrote 2 hours 37 min ago:
I do, but I can only turn it down so much or I lose outdoor
coverage.
esseph wrote 1 hour 23 min ago:
Add outdoor AP, shrink all coverage areas. You should end up
with better performance.
goodburb wrote 3 hours 45 min ago:
You can stick to 802.11r only by lowering the transmission power and
have all the APs on the same channel, in my tests it ended up switching
much faster than K/V. (~75ms)
On iOS, equal channel with correct ESS will switch liberally. On
Android 14+ with Broadcom chip it will start conservative, then switch
liberally after the first poor signal switch-over event, up until
disconnection.
Android (Pixel/Moto) will never switch (even with K/V) on large network
activity, only VoIP/video call. It depends on vendor implementation.
[0]
I use "dp.logcatapp" log reader while roaming,
"com.android.location.fused" can be used to show score and current
load.
Samsung is known to push protocol support early: 802.11r in 2013,
802.11w 2015, some models do not use Android's default connectivity
manager.
To add, WPA3 with 802.11r is known to have issues on Apple hardware
before 2021 on all iOS versions, many Android devices, especially smart
TVs don't support it, will not connect or are unreliable (protected
beacon frame), can be searched in buried report results at OpenWrt
forum mega threads and Ubiquity. WPA2+FT and forced MFP with a long
password is a safe alternative. 802.11r use PMK push on WPA3 compared
to WPA2, which was known to be problematic on older hardware.
802.11K/V is more suitable for campus and load balancing, tuning it
based on RSSI and station metrics is very difficult, enterprise
hardware rely on network traffic and air time.
[0]
URI [1]: https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/wifi-network-sele...
js2 wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
Apple has some minimal recommendations as well:
URI [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102766
rcarmo wrote 2 hours 34 min ago:
Yeah, I tried the same channel thing, but I can't change the power,
really - the flat is wrapped around two elevator shafts :)
goodburb wrote 53 min ago:
The elevators are probably causing rapid blind spots (shadows)
while the user is moving around, 802.11k is indeed useful in this
case for cutting down scan time, since iOS will still scan with
filtered channels.
It's an interesting setup, looking forward to an update.
rcarmo wrote 17 min ago:
You're not getting it. The lift shafts are lined, this is an
armored concrete building in Europe.
dheera wrote 2 hours 35 min ago:
On my Unifi setup at home with multiple APs I had to disable 802.11r
to get things to roam fast. I have Android and Linux laptop, wife has
iPhone and MacBook.
With 802.11r on, things would disconnect for 60+ seconds before
reconnecting. It was a constant frustration of "arrrrrrrggghhhh
fucking connect damnit I'm standing a meter in front of the AP can't
you fucking see it fuck fuck fuck just connect, it's right THERE,
connect NOW, arghhh" and then it would completely disconnect (no wifi
found) and then reconnect a minute later.
With 802.11r off things just roam smoothly. I guess the people who
inventned the tech didn't test it thoroughly enough.
OptionOfT wrote 3 hours 30 min ago:
To be fair, I don't require my 85" TV to roam, as it's not as
portable as my iPhone.
cj wrote 2 hours 55 min ago:
Until it gets stuck on a far away AP because it was the first AP to
come online the last time the network rebooted.
Not sure if roaming is actually the fix for this problem. For
whatever reason my Ring cameras just love connecting to the worst
and most far away AP in my house.
giobox wrote 2 hours 45 min ago:
Not sure how widely available this feature is, but the unifi
controller software for the popular Ubiquiti APs lets you bind
individual client devices to specific APs such that they can only
connect to the ones you choose.
I had to solve a similar issue for some crap IoT lights that
would join the incorrect AP after a power cut every time.
>
URI [1]: https://community.ui.com/questions/Lock-Client-to-Specif...
bobmcnamara wrote 55 min ago:
This, of course, breaks clients that try to connect to the
loudest RSSI when the loudest RSSI that they hear is not the
one that is chosen.
giobox wrote 29 min ago:
Yet to encounter this side effect. So far every crappy wifi
device I've tried has obliged.
anotherhue wrote 2 hours 19 min ago:
for static clients that works well, though you can usually set
a min rssi and get the same benefit without so much clicking.
ssl-3 wrote 1 hour 56 min ago:
That works for fixed devices like a TV, but also tends to
shrink the effective coverage area of the wireless network as
a whole.
That can mean that the portable wifi speaker-widget (which
itself doesn't need much bandwidth) might go from working
fine on the back deck or well-enough about anywhere else in
the yard, to not working at all outside.
esseph wrote 1 hour 26 min ago:
> That works for fixed devices like a TV, but also has the
effect of shrinking the effective coverage area of the
wireless network as a whole.
Which is normally a good thing to push the clients to roam
to a better AP, OR you walked out of the building and want
you phone to disconnect. But yes, does impact overall
coverage area size.
ssl-3 wrote 39 min ago:
That only works if there's a better AP to roam to. It's
often very easy to add more APs indoors; but hanging them
outside is a whole different animal.
Meanwhile: As a practical matter, shrinking coverage
means "Hey, honey! I fixed the TV!" gets met with a
response like "Oh, so that's why I can't listen to
Audible on the veranda anymore!" :)
keanebean86 wrote 3 hours 5 min ago:
Good luck watching the office when your cat pushed your upstairs AP
off the balcony. Your tv won't auto switch to the downstairs AP
which is now closer than the one that's suddenly in the driveway.
basilikum wrote 3 hours 10 min ago:
Glad it works for you.
I need my TV to rapidly switch APs in very heavy load wide area
networks with thousands of devices while I'm cruising through the
venue with my motorized couch and entertainment system.
Now I want to actually build that for GPN24 next week. Wouldn't use
AndroidTV for that though.
bobmcnamara wrote 54 min ago:
My favorite is the WiFi television/sign on an elevator.
jauntywundrkind wrote 3 hours 49 min ago:
I'd used DAWN for band steering/roaming at my last place, which worked
ok. uSteer is a little newer & is an official openwrt project. [1] [2]
DAWN has a wild amount of knobs to tune, which aren't super well
described. I haven't been running it since a single AP covers my
current place very well. But it would be interesting to go evaluate
DAWN & it's config with an LLM, to dice in & see more. uSteer too.
Great write up, good information to share. This really is such an
important next step for many people's wifi and it's documentation is
pretty so-so.
URI [1]: https://github.com/berlin-open-wireless-lab/DAWN
URI [2]: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/dawn
jonhohle wrote 4 hours 0 min ago:
I need to spend some time on it but I purchased two Omada APs to pair
with my OpenWRT router thinking roaming would just work with mostly
Apple devices. That didnât happen. Iâm hoping some of this article
applies and I can improve the situation a bit.
biggc wrote 1 hour 9 min ago:
I had a hell of a time getting WiFi roaming to work in my house
between Omada APs in a low-interference suburban neighborhood.
Any combination of 802.11r and k/v seemed to just cause my phone's
connection to drop for minutes at a time when moving around the
house.
I wish I could remember my exact solution for you, I believe I just
turned off 802.11r and k/v, set channel selection to automatic, and
undid any manual or automatic power tuning.
andor wrote 3 hours 32 min ago:
For Omada devices, you need a "Controller". You can run the Omada
Controller software on an existing computer, get one of their
controller devices, or use their cloud-based service, which should be
free at your scale.
jonathanlydall wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
Iâm pretty happy with my Omada controlled EAPs around my house.
Running Omada on my Windows Server was painful (doesnât really
run properly as a service, software updates are a chore), but since
I moved it to run on Proxmox using a super simple LXC image (I
maybe got terminology wrong here) itâs been very nice.
Supposedly I should have excellent roaming between the APs, but
Iâm not sure how to check. Certainly, walking from one end of the
house the other while on a Teams or WhatsApp call on my phone has
maybe only a super minimal amount of time that I might not hear the
other person (sub second for sure, if at all), but mostly I donât
notice.
neogodless wrote 3 hours 29 min ago:
The Omada device* I researched also supports standalone mode and
hosts the web UI like any other consumer router.
*
URI [1]: https://www.omadanetworks.com/us/business-networking/omada...
joshred wrote 2 hours 48 min ago:
Having the controller is still nice. It's relatively user
friendly, and consolidates all the devices and their interfaces
under a single UI.
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