mr74 - roaming issues

[AKAY]

Hi,

I have recently installed 3 MR74 AP's and am having issues where my legacy devices, when roaming between the AP's seem to take a long while to be released from the original AP it was connected to .

Sometimes the original AP does not release the connection and I have to wait for the device to move back to its original AP.

I believe it is trying to roam as when i click on the device from the current clients list it shows it as connected to one of the other AP's 

Any help / advice appreciated

Thanks

[PhilipDAth]

The original AP doesn't "release" the client.  The client simply re-associates to whatever AP it wants.

So this is client driven behaviour.  You might not be able to do much if this is a legacy device.  I'm guessing their are no firmware updates for it.

You could try checking the wireless event log, but I don't like your chances.

[cmr]

If they do move over (but only when the signal has completely gone) you can reduce the radio power of the APs so the coverage overlaps less.  As @PhilipDAth  said, if they are truly legacy, like some of the PDQs we have, then they see each SSID on each AP as a different network so the only option there is to have a different SSID per AP and set up a profile on them for each, they might then move.

[BlakeRichardson]

@AKAY  As mentioned this is an issue on the client side, depending on the type of client you might be able to make changes to how the OS deal with hand over but this would be unsupported by the OS vendor and is murky waters. 

[NolanHerring]

What channels are the access points operating on and what channels do those legacy clients support? Are they 2.4GHz only or do they support 5GHz?

What power level are the access points running at? If they are running high, then you might have way too much coverage overlap between the access points, meaning the clients won't roam because they can hear the first AP too well still, even when standing under another AP.

Its possible it isn't able to see all of the access points because they might be using DFS channels or something the legacy clients don't support.

As others already mentioned, the client decides 100% when to roam based on whatever algorithm it has built-in.