[TriLUG] Wireless AP recommendation

[Aaron Joyner via TriLUG]

Yes, they do "seamless" handover, in one of two ways.  They were originally
famous for doing the zero-handoff
<https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/205144590-UniFi-What-is-Zero-Handoff->
approach
that Aruba popularized (at 1/3rd to 1/10th the cost, depending on what you
compared to), but for modern clients and modern wireless environments
that's not really the best approach any more.  The basic description of
their current approach (Fast Roaming
<https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004662107>) is that the APs
actively work together to plan which clients should connect to which AP,
and once a client crosses a threshold and really should be connected to an
adjacent AP, they will send a disconnect message to the client to cause it
to reconnect.  This results in basically seamless operation while a client
moves around, and avoids the client being sticky to a "distant" AP when
they're standing right next to a "close" AP.  I say "basically" because the
client does have to channel-switch to the new network so there may be
50-250ms of dropped connectivity during a switch from one AP to the next.
The advantage is that you can have APs much closer together (on separate
channels), and therefore support much higher AP and client density, and
much more bandwidth for all the clients.  The tradeoff is that with
zero-handoff your client never knows that it's now talking to the new AP,
and so there's not actually any dropped packets when you start talking to
that new AP on the same channel.  The big sales pitch was for WiFi VOIP you
could wander around a very large installation and never drop a call, or
experience a drop in the audio content.  With my Project Fi phone making a
VOIP call I can walk a path I *know* will force an AP and channel switch.
If I'm listening to music-on-hold I can hear it happen, but I've never
noticed it outside of a manufactured example.  As a more important metric,
I don't think my wife (a frequent Project Fi Wifi caller) has ever noticed
it, and I can say with confidence she has never mentioned it.

Aaron S. Joyner


On Thu, Aug 24, 2017 at 10:54 AM, Bill Farrow via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org>
wrote:

> At home I have a mix of Ubiquity AP and TP-Link running OpenWRT. The
> Ubiquity AP work really well, so well in fact that I am going to
> replace the TP-Link unit with another Ubiquity AP.
>
> I believe that by using multiple Ubiquity APs and the Ubiquity
> management service (java app ?) is that client devices will seamlessly
> handover from one AP to the next without dropping connections. Perhaps
> someone here can confirm this ?
>
>
> Bill
> --
> This message was sent to: Aaron S. Joyner <aaron at joyner.ws>
> To unsubscribe, send a blank message to trilug-leave at trilug.org from that
> address.
> TriLUG mailing list : https://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
> Unsubscribe or edit options on the web  : https://www.trilug.org/
> mailman/options/trilug/aaron%40joyner.ws
> Welcome to TriLUG: http://trilug.org/welcome
>