[lawry]

What hardware, and what kind of settings do you need to seek to have a working roaming network?

I've a Mikrotik router at home (very educational), and I've very often heard UniFi ap's can do it properly. Can I do it with Mikrotik aps? Will setting it up be hell?

[willidiots]

In general see my response to grk, you can roam with any network that meets these criteria:

1. All APs use the same SSID

2. All APs bridge users onto the same subnet

But the experience will vary from client to client in terms of how aggressively they roam. Many AP vendors offer knobs to "help" clients roam by kicking clients off at a certain signal threshold, supposedly triggering a roam: in practice, this just upsets many clients.

Re #1: "SSID" is actually shorthand for "ESSID" - Extended service set identifier. Each AP has its own "BSSID" - Basic service set identifier, which is the AP's Wi-Fi MAC address. The whole concept of an "ESSID" is to signal to clients that a certain group of APs belong to the same system.

Re #2: If you need to scale beyond a single subnet, you generally solve for this by terminating users on a centralized packet core / wireless controller, which shards users out onto multiple subnets.

[aidenn0]

I switched from single to multiple ESSID when I found most laptops would not switch BSSID until they completely lost connectivity. It was a shame because both Android phones one iPhone I tried worked great under this setup.