Orbi, roaming and sticky clients

Hi there,

first of all, sorry for the late reply, but it took some time for me to read and nearly understand the linked information.

FURRYe38  wrote:
What do you mean by sticky clients?

With sticky clients I mean the behaviour of our iOS devices in combination with our powerline wifi set. We have 3 powerline access points with identical wifi settings and the devices stick at one access point even when we move the devices inside the house towards a much stronger access point. I found some documents from Apple where they mention a roaming treshold of -70dB for this type of devices. I remember for example that when my MacBook showed -67 dB the internet connection was almost unusable - maybe this happens due to a stronger noise signal at our location and a resulting lower SNR. But the MacBook sticks at the weak access point and I have to switch WiFi off and on to get back a usable internet connection.

If I understand correctly, Orbi seem to have the cabability to support useful features, but does acutally not make use of all of them (e.g. 802.11k). Other features are used, but does not seem to work properly with the Clients (e.g. band steering or 11k measurement requests). And there seem to be some very unfortunate decisions from the guys whow make the WiFi standards, because they did not consider to give the AP the control for roaming decisions and so every manufacturer creates their own proprietary roaming algorithm solution for the clients (e.g. observing RSSI instead of SNR). And it truly worries me that enabling 802.11r is supposed to kick off older devices completely. Well, maybe in 10 or 20 years (when I get to be an old man) roaming performs almost flawlessly.

I found an interesting blog about "Zero Handoff" introduced by a company called "Ubiquity"". To me it sounds too good to be true that the client thinks all the time he is talking to one big AP and moving around is no longer a problem. I could easily live with the restrictions of Zero Handoff (only 1 channel for all Clients and therefore less speed). But sadly the company decided to stop this "Solution" in favour to this game of pure chance all the other manufactures are using. This sounds almost unbelievable - does anyone know why this promising technology was not enhanced?

FURRYe38  wrote:
What is the size of your home? Sq Ft?

On the ground floor we need approx. 1800 Sq Ft.
On the first floor we need approx. 500 Sq Ft.
The house is bigger, but we don't need WiFi everywhere and the shape of the first floor is a subset of the shape of the ground floor.

FURRYe38  wrote:
What is the distance between the router and satellite(s)?

The router is located in the basement next to the telephone system together with a powerline adapter and we currently have 3 powerline wifi access points (2 on the ground floor with a bit more than 30 feet distance and 1 on the first floor).

FURRYe38  wrote:
What is the Mfr and model# of the ISP modem that you currenty use? Built in router and wifi?

I'm from Germany and our ISP is "Deutsche Telekom". My modem router is a Zyxel Speedlink 5501 and it's wifi is permanently switched off.

FURRYe38  and CrimpOn , thank you very much for your help so far. It is not the result I hoped for, but I'm grateful to know this before I buy expensive hardware and spend days with that kind of roaming.

Best regards
Hans