Explain nitty gritty of mesh wireless system

[Vikas]

So for years and years I avoided taking plunge with mesh network. I prided myself with hobknobbing multiple routers, multiple access points, wifi-extenders etc to take advantage of the CAT5 wiring that I had put in the house when the house was built. But it had been always a nightmare to get decent and stable coverage.

Eventually, I broke down and gave $150 to Costco for Netgear Mini Orbi 2-pack knowing that if it did not work for me, Costco will take it back with no questions asked.

The setup was little bit trickier to do as I wanted it in access point mode. I had to do it couple of times before the setup worked even though I was doing it very methodically via one step at a time. I had to power cycle couple of times when it did not come up the way it should have. The color indicator light had been pretty much useless.

I have 50mb service and with the 2-pack, my whole house, garage, basement gets full coverage! Many of the features are disabled in AP mode but I guess I will live with that. For example, there is zero support for the packet counting or measuring traffic associated with attached clients when in AP mode.

Questions to "real" network engineer aka Overkill etc:- Why does Orbi satellite asks and gets its own DHCP address? Are the two boxes talking IP protocol for back-haul and management?

I still have couple of computers and Roku box behind another old router and I need to associate them with the newly unified top level subnet. I also want to make sure mesh network stays up for couple of weeks before declaring success as it will NOT be the first time that a router firmware has slow leak and starts chewing up memory or connections before needing total reboot periodically.

But provisionally, I am ecstatic. I am giving myself a dope slap with "why didn't I do this before?"

 

[dogememe]

Originally Posted by Vikas


Questions to "real" network engineer aka Overkill etc:- Why does Orbi satellite asks and gets its own DHCP address? Are the two boxes talking IP protocol for back-haul and management?



Yes.

 

[OVERKILL]

You pretty much answered your own question

Yes, they are assigned IP's for visibility and management. There will be (or should be) client roaming, which utilizes hand-offs that, based on proximity allow seamless passage from one AP to the other without interruption. This of course (fast roaming) needs to be supported by the clients as well, but most these days do. So there is a fair deal of communication between the units to track clients, their proximity and the like.

 

[Saul]

If your orbis don't work, pick up 2-3 of these and flash to Asus firmware and put them in mesh. They are great. Occasionally on sale for 40 each.
https://www.t-mobile.com/accessory/t-mobile-wi-fi-cellspot-router-certified-pre-owned

 

[Vikas]

Originally Posted by OVERKILL
You pretty much answered your own question

Yes, they are assigned IP's for visibility and management. There will be (or should be) client roaming, which utilizes hand-offs that, based on proximity allow seamless passage from one AP to the other without interruption. This of course (fast roaming) needs to be supported by the clients as well, but most these days do. So there is a fair deal of communication between the units to track clients, their proximity and the like.

Interesting! Surprisingly, Orbi setup did NOT have an option to assign fixed IP address to the satellite. I would have preferred it to have its address next to the main box address that I assigned aka at the end of range.

But at least my main router tries to keep most IP addresses same once it sees a new client MAC. I suspect it does not release the address ever if I am not going over the max client count but I wonder how it handles the collision if it hashes MAC address to come up with the IP address. I would be shocked if it is keeping the used address table in its non-volatile storage. But it must be as we have quite frequent power outages over the years.

 

[gathermewool]

With my two Asus routers, it's as simple as can be. I purchased a brand new router, to be our main router, and used our three year-old router as a node, halfway across the house. It was SUPER simple to setup!

Our bedroom PC went from two bars of wifi signal to four (full). I used to have trouble with wifi signal in our master bath, which is at the opposite end of the house from the main router, and now I have full signal.

 

[Vikas]

The clients hanging to the wrong access point had been driving me nuts for years and that problem gets resolved with the mesh network.

 

[mk378]

The used address table is volatile. But the DHCP server will ping any proposed IP address to make sure that no one else is using it already.

Meshing is a method to backhaul wirelessly with zero configuration. The improved client roaming is a different system unrelated to how the APs are backhauled (other than that they need to communicate with each other on the same network to share client information). When you buy a "mesh system" you get both features.