Wifi Roaming at Home

The problem

I live in a 3-story house in London. Wifi coverage is best horizontally for most access points. That’s why you get good coverage when you’re on the same floor as your Wifi access point, but the reception gets bad when you go upstairs or downstairs.

You can use one Wifi access points for each floor and give them different network names (SSIDs). This is clunky. You would have to swtich between networks as you move in your house.

You can also use the same SSID and Wifi settings for all access points, but this doesn’t always work. Many times your phone will stay with the wrong Access Point even though you’ll get much better signal from another Access Point.

There are expensive and complicated solutions for this problem. Those are usually found in commercial buildings, airports and shopping malls. Those solutions work on a central control system that orchestrates access points and the clients’ access to them.

The solution

To build the same system at home, the only solution I have found was to use Apple AirPort Extreme as the main controller. Here is how I built a seamless Wifi roaming network for my house which has been working flawlessly for the past month.

What do you need?

One Apple AirPort Extreme
One Apple AirPort Express for every floor of the house (-1 as the Extreme will act as an Access Point for it’s own floor).

Wired or Wireless?

I had ethernet cables running through the house when we built the place. I still prefer wired connections as they are more reliable, have higher bandwidth and don’t get affected by Wifi issues upstream.

This post is about setting up the network with using wired ethernet cables.

Let’s get started

First you need to setup your modem. Cable, ADSL, Fibre whatever you have, you need to make sure it is up and running and you get an Ethernet internet port out of it. I recently switched to BT Infinity 2. They give you a combined Modem + Router + Wireless Access Point called BTHomeHub 5 which I threw out and used the old BT VDSL Modem instead.

Once you have internet, then connect your AirPort Extreme to the Modem. Use PPPoE settings to connect to your ISP. For BT, the username is [email protected] with no password.

Now you can setup your Wifi, Guest Wifi and other settings on AirPort Extreme using AirPort Utility.

Now you should have a single Wifi Access Point at home. Let’s move on to the second floor.

Unwrap your AirPort Express (or reset it to factory settings by holding down the tiny reset button for 7 seconds while connecting it to power) and connect its WAN port it to one of the AirPort Extreme LAN ports.

Use the AirPort Utility to find the new AirPort Express. Give it a relevant name and set it up to extend AirPort Extreme via Ethernet. This will setup a new Wifi network with the exact same SSID and security settings. It is important to note that it should create a new network instead of extending an existing one.

Repeat this for other floors.

You should have your network setup now!

Gotchas

Now this seems easy but these are the points I found when setting up my network:

1. This solution only works with Apple AirPort Extreme being the orchestrator and Apple AirPort Express as extending access points. You cannot use the same method with non-Apple network equipment.
2. You need to connect each AirPort Express to a single AirPort Extreme LAN port. Don’t share Extreme ports with a switch.
3. If you are using power line ethernet, remember that power line Ethernet equipment make the whole power line of the house like a single switch. This means you can use it only for one of your AirPort Expresses. Your wifi romaing will not work correctly if you connect more than one AirPort Express to your power line network.