WIFI??? can signals overlap?

[mcveigh]

a friend asked me this today. he put in 2 WAPS in a business. when person is connected to one wap, they move around the building until the signal is lost then it pickus up the other wap. this sucks because a tsomepoints it still gets a minimal signal but won't switch to the stronger source. I think he's using all D-link equipment.

is this normal or can you make it jump automatically with no conection loss to the stronger source?

 

[rw120555]

What I do is briefly disable the connection, then re-enable it. It'll pick up the stronger source then.

 

[mcveigh]

but that's a hassle for a non-techie person. apparnetly this guy was annoyed at the drop off.

 

[ktwebb]

802.11b clients do like to hold on to the association they have. Even with the high end equipment. If the two cells don't overlap more than say 50% you might try using the same frequency base on both AP's. That's the only way I have ever found to make roaming a bit more transparent. If the cells overlap too much you'll get some interference but you'll be able to tell that pretty quickly, especially if you have an SNR meter (quality) on your client utility.

 

[Vegito]

hey Im getting a second AP for my house.. do you know if you need two different access point name or can you just use 2 different channel and one name ?

 

[rw120555]

I have my two aps configured identically (same ssid, channel, WEP, Mac address filtering), which is what I think you are supposed to do if you want to use roaming. They are fairly far apart from each other so I don't think there is any interference problem.

I think you could use different SSIDs and channels. If so, it would be like having two different wireless networks that you could connect to, and you could choose which one you wanted. Not sure why you would want to do that, unless maybe the roaming isn't working too well or the WAPs are interfering with each other.