Roaming between multiple wifi access points with same SSID?

[djvictoid]

Just got my hands on a Droid... and now I'm working out some kinks. My iPhone and laptop have no problem roaming aggressively between multiple access points we have at work that share the same SSID. I can't seem to get the Droid to do the same thing. I've tried downloading some wifi scanners, but they don't quite cut it. Is there a setting I'm missing? The expected behavior would be for the Droid to happily associate with any AP that shares a "remembered" SSID. Right now, it requires manually going into settings and associating with each and every AP in order for it to hop automatically as I move around the building... Ideas?

 

[lephisto]

Hi there,

i have exactly the same issue.. i want to use my droid (milestone in my case) in our Corporate lan, and it seems that the droid does not take the different strength of the different AP's and selects the one which was first logged in.

I think we need a lil app, that differentiates the different MAC's within an ssid..

 

[djvictoid]

well, since my first post, i've worked on it more with our IT department, and it seems as if the Droid has trouble associating with some AP brands/models. the behavior I observed was likely due to the fact that the Droid's wifi stack freezes up on attempting to associate with Enterasys RoamAbout APs. there's a long thread on a related behavior that's over on Motorola's support forums. one guy found that disabling WME on a rooted Droid by editing tiwlan.ini allows him to associate with an HP 420 AP. i haven't yet tried this, since i'm concerned about the lack of a well validated recovery image (to undo the rooting hack if necessary), but chances are that i will eventually have to unless google/motorola pushes out an update.

long story short, you should see whether your troubles are due to a specific brand/model of AP that your Milestone doesn't like. there seems to be unusually poor wifi interoperability on these devices.

 

[lephisto]

@djvictoid:

That could also be an issue with Encryption, and prolly not Roaming..

What encryption do you use on your corporate lan?

lephisto

 

[djvictoid]

no encryption. it turns out to be a bug in the android wifi stack. we have APs from different manufacturers sharing the same SSID, and unfortunately the Droid can't associate with a subset of APs manufactured by Enterasys (whereas thousands of other devices have no trouble). others have said that this bug extends back to the dev G1, but it's still not fixed. there's an enormous thread on motorola support about this general set of problems:

https://supportforums.motorola.com/thread/16191?start=390&tstart=0

and this is one of several bug reports (although i'm not sure if this precisely matches our scenario, since DHCP fails for us):

Issue 5088 - android - WiFi doesn't work with certain routers (DHCP, ARP works succesfully but everything else fails, DNS, ICMP, TCP etc - can provide pcap dumps if needed) - Project Hosting on Google Code