Wireless SSID's

[jonathan.lees]

I'm having a bit of a wireless frenzy today, basically in our school we have several AP's dotted around installed by myself. I gave each one a seperate SSID and a unique channel, problem here is that roaming does not work too well. What would happen if every AP had the same SSID, would it work or would I need to buy a wireless switch and advanced management to achieve this?

 

thanks

[Ric_]

For roaming to work, all APs need to have the same SSID and you need to have the channels of adjacent APs set as far away as possible.

 

If you have the money mind, I would go for a managed wireless infrastructure (I use BlueSocket).

[strawberry]

although they have individual channels the 11 (or 13) channels available will overlap. The optimum set up is to use 1, 6, and 11 in the same region as those 3 dont overlap each other. Best thing to do is use a product like netstumbler and walk around your school, see which areas have overlapping signal and rearrange your channels.

 

The common symptons with overlapping channels are that the signal will show up strong, but the information passed to it will become distrorted ( think 2 tv signals on one channel).

 

One ssid enables laptops to go from one ap to another almost seemlessly rather than having to reconnect.