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Forum Discussion
Problems switching in Mesh
Since two years I have a setup with one router (RBR850) and three satellites (RBS850). All satellites are wired to the router. This should be set up as a mesh network, so that my devices automatical...
Gotrah wrote:
my iPhone or Macbook says it's connected to wifi, but shows 5G instead. Then none of my wifi functionality is available, e.g. control Sonos. After waiting for a couple of minutes, it does connect to wifi again and everything works perfectly. Could anyone tell me what could be set up wrong?
I have a suspicion that the concrete floor is causing a situation that the Apple networking software is not designed to handle. Would it be possible to experiment with turning off cellular data. (Can iPhone do that? This Macbook probably does not have LTE capability, correct?) Does the behavior change when LTE data is not an option for the iPhone?**
There are internet standards for how mobile devices change from one WiFi access point to another. IEEE 802.11k, r, and v. (Wikipedia has articles about them.) I believe they are enabled by default on modern WiFi systems.
What I think is happening is the transition is not gradual. In most scenarios, as the mobile device moves, the WiFi signal from the current access point begins to fade away while the signal from a different access point becomes stronger. At some point, the device will device to change access points and will send management frames announcing, "I'm leaving that one" and "I want to associate with this one". With the concrete floor, the iPhone or Macbook may just suddenly "lose the signal" and the iPhone may switch to LTE data (which may also have a punk signal) before discovering that there is another WiFi access point with an SSID that it knows.
Investigating this sort of thing is not trivial*. What i would do is configure a WiFi adapter in monitor mode set to the current WiFi channel and record all of the management frames which involve the iPhone. (Wireshark can capture management frames and a display filter can be used to isolate the frames from the iPhone.) The iPhone or Macbook may show one pattern of management frames when walking around the ground floor and a different pattern when going from one floor to the other.
* "incredibly frustrating" may be a more appropriate description of the process. I found that some WiFi adapters simply cannot be put into monitor mode. Some will do monitor mode on Linux but not on Windows. Getting Wireshark to capture correctly, etc. etc.
** Another experiment might be to invite someone to bring an Android phone over and see what happens going between floors. I would expect the guest WiFi to show the same behavior.