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I like Mikrotik gear but IMHO their wireless stack isn't great.

I moved my four HAP AC devices onto OpenWRT; speed and stability has been much improved, and roaming works much better. If you don't need WiFi 6 then I'd go as far as to say this is a great solution.




How hard was it to setup the roaming?

That has been my (one?) major complaint with my Ubiquiti APs - I have four of them scattered around my house/garage and moving between them always suffers a bit of a delay in handing over (or refusing to hand over at all).

I recently migrated a router (not Ubiquiti) over to OpenWRT and have been happy with the stability. I read a bit about roaming, but thought it looked a little daunting.


Actually pretty simple.

Here's an example: https://parkercs.tech/enabling-802-11r-fast-roaming-transiti...

I did lose the central management interface of Mikrotik (CAPsMAN) but for my home set-up this wasn't a big deal. I used the backup and restore capability in OpenWRT's LUCI interface to clone most of the settings.

Roaming / fast transition now works much better. I do still lose a few packets as I wonder around but nowhere near as flakey as on the Mikrotik stack.

I did spend an inordinate amount of time optimising channels, signal strength and placement etc. on the Mikrotik stack before migrating over, and so I kept these settings on OpenWRT. I think a lot of making wifi work well is in this particular black art. All things being equal, though, OpenWRT works better for me.




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