Multiple Wi-Fi routers and seamless roaming

Question

I live in a quite large house. It's on four floors, and it has thick walls; having a reliable Wi-Fi connection everywhere is a struggle.

At the moment, I'm using several independent routers, each one with its own SSID and connected to the WAN network. This solution works fine as long as I'm standing still in one point, but as soon as I walk away from the router I start getting problems. Indeed my devices stay connected to a router until the connection drops, and only then they connect to the next router, causing a few seconds gap.

An alternative setup to mine would be using the same SSID, encryption and password for all the routers, so that my devices only see one network. The problem with this setup is essentially the same of the first one: even tho the devices only see one network, there are several different routers; so they tend to stay connected to one router until the connection drops, and then they switch to a better one, still causing a gap.

I think the best solution would be routers that "talk" to each other and handle the network switching by themselves, generating a single whole network so that it appears that only one router exists, and the devices keep transferring data seamlessly while moving from one point to another.

I think that's what the eero routers do. eeros talk to each other wirelessly, but I wouldn't mind wiring my routers together.

Does such a solution exist for "normal" routers? How should I set them up? Should I just buy some eero routers? Or should I just bear with my current setup?

Answer 1

You correctly noticed that Wi-Fi already handles roaming natively – that's what the SSID (network name) is for. If a device sees multiple access points with the same SSID, it assumes all of them are equivalent and roams whenever necessary.

However, for this to work properly you don't need "routers which talk to each other". You need quite the opposite – simple access points which are the Wi-Fi equivalent of an Ethernet switch, with no routing functionality in them.

There needs to be one router somewhere, for serving DHCP and stuff – possibly within the same device as a Wi-Fi access point, but not necessarily.

                                      ---- [AP]
                                     /
(internet) ~~~ [modem] --- [router] ----- [AP]
                                     \
                                      [switch] -- [AP]
                                       |  |  \
                                      AP  AP  AP

While this is not the place for product recommendations, I've been looking recently into the standalone Wi-Fi APs sold by UniFi and Mikrotik. However, if you already have a pile of "wireless routers", you can easily turn them into pure access points.

To reiterate the dozens of existing pages on "how to stack two routers":

1. first see if the router has a dedicated 'bridge' mode – if yes, just enable it;
2. otherwise, turn off DHCP Server (and perhaps UPnP) in the device, and connect it to the main 'upstream' router through a LAN port – this will bypass the actual "router" component, and connect Wi-Fi to the existing LAN.