Dlink DIR-825 wireless router one-day sale $119.99

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 11:49:28AM -0400, James Knott wrote:
> When I've set up dual band equipment, it has been for business  
> customers, where the user shouldn't have to know about the WiFi bands.   
> As I mentioned in the other note, when I use multiple IDs, it's to  
> connect for different VLANs, as some places may have for staff & visitor  
> use.  The visitor SSID & VLAN is configured to be similar to that guest  
> mode, where the visitors can only access the internet and not the  
> corporate LAN.

The guest mode certainly makes sense.  I do not think roaming between
2.4 and 5ghz makes any sense though.  They are very different.

> It's been my experience that the band is chosen according to the order  
> of the connection in the connection list.  However, this experience has  
> only been with Windows, as I haven't had the occasion to try it in Linux.

Well with linux I have found it imposible to connect to the 5ghz band
when the same SSID is used simply because network-manager or whatever
decided always picked the highest signal strength (which is pretty much
always 2.4ghz).

So yes if you want automatic roaming, it can be handy, but on the other
hand some devices only do 2.4ghz so they would get no benefit, and you
are making it imposible for a user to specificly choose the better band.
Perhaps in a corporate setting there won't be any interfering networks
close by, but at a home there certainly is.

I remember at the linux symposium last year the wifi had both bands and
used one SSID for both bands on the whole network.  There was no way
to get it to connect to the 5ghz band.  The 2.4ghz band was flacky and
very busy, so the 5ghz band would have been much nicer to use, but there
simple was no way to convince linux to connect to the 5ghz band instead.
Extremely annoying.  Sure network-manager and such should perhaps be
made better to allow a way to force the specific connection to use rather
than just using the SSID, but so far that doesn't seem to have happened.
Until clients unversilally have a good way to choose, using the same
SSID for both bands essentially just throws away the 5ghz band because
no one will ever be able to connect to it because it almost always has
a lower apparenty signal strength

-- 
Len Sorensen
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