WiFi Roaming

About a month ago I bought a new router, draftN this time, to speed up my network and to add a shared USB port. It worked rather less than well, and as it stands it doesn't really reach as far as I wanted in terms of features. On the USB port I attached an 1T external hard drive, and it works fine, but the speed is horrendous, which I expected. The bad thing is that it is absolutely incompatible with anything you can imagine, so the only way to get stuff out of it is to copy it somewhere else - disconnect the drive from the router's USB port and nobody will be able to read it...

Well, I moved the old G router to the living room, where the connection strength was really bad, and I decided to try to set up a WiFi roaming (meaning the device(s) would transparently and automatically move from one AP to the other as I moved through the house). It's been an interesting experience and almost fully successful.

The setup of the APs was rather simple. as my DSL modem holds all the routing functions (firewall, router, DHCP,...) I only use the WiFi routers as APs. All I had to do was to set them both up identically - same SSID, security settings and the such. Easy peasy.

My wife's netbook seemed to work rather well, roaming form one AP to the other without problems. But my phone didn't want to. As both APs manage to maintain at least a trace of a signal in all corners of the house, the phone kept its connection to first AP it connected to even in places where the other AP provided a much stronger signal. It seems Android doesn't have native WiFi roaming - this is 4.1 I'm talking about. However, some googling unearthed a small app called Best WiFi that supposedly solved exactly this problem: at a (user set) level of the signal, it forces the device to reconnect to the strongest AP available. I installed it, set it up and everything seemed to work fine.

Now comes the "almost" part.. It seems to work fine when I connect first to the new router in the basement and then I move to the living room - it transfers immediately to the old G router. However, when I head back downstairs, it takes a long time and it keeps reconnecting again and again at the old G router until at some point (after I get bored watching it going up and down) it finally connects to the new router. I only have a couple of ideas about the root cause, and I am really in no hurry to test them (considering I have a week left until my big overseas holiday...). First, the old router is on channel 2 and the new one on 8, so maybe it tries to connect first to the first/lowest channel it finds. Second, the signal strength the old router provides at the new router's location (den in the basement) is way better than the signal strength the new one provides in the old one's location (living room), so maybe the phone still sees the old router and keeps at it... I'll probably switch the channels at some point to see what happens... but I'm in not hurry for now.