I live in a duplex apartment where the floor slab between the two floors is very thick, such that, if I am upstairs, for instance, my laptop and phone can "see" the downstairs access point, but the upstairs access point gives much better access. Nonetheless, if my device is connected to the downstairs AP, going upstairs doesn't disconnect it and reconnect to the stronger AP, instead it just gives much poorer access via the downstairs AP. The same is true in reverse, of course. The router lives downstairs and the APs are hardwired to the router (in other words, they are APs not repeaters).
My only solution is to manually disconnect and reconnect when I move between floors. Is there a better solution? Would a mesh network work any differently? The intelligence (it seems to me) needs to reside on the client side, not the AP/network/router side.
(Edit: there was a prompt, automated I think, asking if this was a duplicate of another question, one about increasing wifi range. My question is not about increasing the range of existing wifi access points, but about raising the level of intelligence around which AP is chosen by a device and whether, and how, a device can switch from an AP with a weak signal to one with a strong signal.)
Best Answer
Set both access points to the same network name (SSID).
Make sure both have the same network security settings, non-mixed, AES only, Same network keys, but on non-overlapping channels.
Set the fist router lan address to the lowest available address in the subnet. Example: 192.168.1.1 /24 Set DHCP accordingly.
Set the second router address to the highest in the subnet Example:192.168.1.254 /24 And turn off DHCP on this router. Make sure the second router is connected to one of the LAN ports of the first.
On some model routers it will help to give the wireless client device a static IP address outside of the DHCP range.
If you can find roaming settings in your devices set them to high/aggressive.
That should be it. The wireless devices should automatically switch to the highest strength AP.