What is better to use for "seamless" WIFI, Mikrotik or Ubiquiti?

Question

System administration

Hello!
Such a question: We are moving to a new office, I want to cover it with a “seamless” wifi office + territory nearby. Before that, I used Mikrotik with its CapsMan for such purposes, but sometimes there were troubles with it, and it didn’t always work as I wanted. Now I’m thinking further whether use Mikrotik with its CapsMan or look towards ubiquiti
What do you recommend?

Answer 1

Wi-Fi works fine for both Ubiquitu and MikroTik, only for the first it works from the box, and for the second - with a tambourine.
In one telegram chat, a person recently wrote well about the essence of "seamless" roaming:
tl;dr It does not exist. Humble yourself.
"Ololo, or "Seamless roaming in 802.11 aka Wi-Fi"
or "How marketers sell, but ignoramuses believe"
Brief theses and explanations of the essence.
The client is looking for points where it can connect
The client decides when to reconnect
The client decides where to connect
The client initiates reconnection
The client chooses which frequency to connect to (2.4 or 5 GHz) the
AP can:
- Respond with a delay to authentication requests from the client (as one of the implementations of band-steering, for example)
- Deny authentication to the client (signal strength, high load on the AP, etc.)
- De-authenticate the client (should be used as a "last resort ".
- Provide the client with an optimized list of neighboring APs for roaming - 802.11k
- Provide information about the load of other 802.11v APs
- Speed ​​up the roaming process using "fast authentication" instead of the full reauthentication process - 802.11r
At the same time, kvr is completely optional and required support for this by both the client and the AP
(explanations are specially simplified for easy understanding, those who want to dive deeper - read the standards)
In all of this, "CAN" is the key word. Despite all of the above, it is the client who decides where and how he wants to connect, and his decisions may not completely coincide with the "recommendations and desires" received from the AP. Because those who wrote the drivers and module firmware decided so.
This is where typical situations come in:
- UA de-authenticates/does not authenticate the client. He continues to try to connect to the "old" AP. Because he wants to. Roaming does not occur. Wifi at the client is not connected.
- Ignoring by the client one of the frequencies (2.4 or 5 GHz) simply because he has a priority of one of them somewhere inside.
As the "last word" and the result: "Seamless" roaming in 802.11 aka Wi-Fi does not exist in principle. Maximum - "fast roaming on steroids." We cannot influence the behavior of the client in any way, just hope for the adequacy of its drivers / firmware.
As such, "real" roaming, which "handover" is not in 802.11 and is not provided for by the standard.

Answer 2

Unifae have no seamless roaming.
There is centralized configuration through a tool on a computer - there is a single SSID for a group of points and general authorization - too, but when switching between points, a reconnection occurs.
You read the article:
https://habr.com/ru/post/312948/

Answer 3

I used Edimax's solution. There is an article on Habré that inspired me to use this equipment. I liked how they did it, except for one minus. To apply the changes, you must restart all points.
For small offices, a solution from Keenetik is suitable. They started to include roaming in the last revision.

Answer 4

Ubiks, as already said, do not support "seamless" roaming, but their implementation is not even bad for the money. We didn’t manage to work properly as a capsman - the main troubles were on cheap wifi interfaces for clients (Chinese TSD on Android). Constant glitches. In the same turn, good laptops and phones worked perfectly. Elementary ping on the transition very rarely missed packets. But Mikrotik himself declares not to expect anything special from them, because. for them, this direction is only at the stage of conception and their point is simply to close the market segment. Maybe later they will finish everything. We eventually went to extreme networks (aka zebra, aka Motorola). Yes, setting up requires certain skills and knowledge, experience in cisco style in cli), but the possibilities are enormous. The price tag is lower than Aruba, for example - the main thing is to find a normal seller. But there are some problems with Intel interfaces when Windows wakes up - it is buggy on transitions from 20 to 40 MHz. Macs for example work without failures. Not advertising - just an alternative option.

Answer 5

Make EAP WPA2-Enterprise where the session is stored in a radius and roaming will be almost seamless. :)