Comment by blindriver
11 hours ago
One thing that wasn't mentioned is that the more APs you have, the worst off your life gets. That's because the way clients connect to a particular AP is done client-side and you have no control over it or visibility. So, no matter how you fiddle with it, your client may connect to the AP that is 40 feet away and on another floor rather than the one that is 10 feet away with a perfect line of sight. And you won't know why. This is the problem I had with my house and had to decrease the number of APs to get over better reliability and performance.
There's band steering. You absolutely do have control, if you opt to do so.
On openwrt, DAWN or usteer can both help your APs to get sounding maps from clients and to tell them which AP to join. Looking at the sounding maps is very fun data to see: highly tecommend! The settings aren't the world's greatest but they are pretty good starts! https://github.com/berlin-open-wireless-lab/DAWN https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/dawn
Multiple APs are really nice because you can turn down the AP power, ideally, as you add more stations. Unfortunately I don't think you can tell a client to be quieter though; someone's laptop can be at 200mW tearing the hell out of the spectrum when everyone else is nicely conversing at 10-20mW.
My experience with DAWN wasn't great. Some of my clients don't like the extensions you need, so I had to go back to no roaming extensions and just hoping clients make good decisions and tuning ap power levels to help.
Might try it again though, I'd love for it to work. And I was also dealing with some baseline wifi instability that I think firmware updates has resolved.
From what I hear, Macs are stickier and Windows clients more promiscuous. So a Mac will stick with an AP further out when you have one near, on the other hand a Windows client can go back and forth between APs -which can sometimes be a problem too.