So, in the past few months, I have overhauled my entire home network setup. The details call for a separate blog post at some time, I guess. But yes, I’ve switched to Unifi access points.

The one thing that took me a while to get right was the seamless roaming. I came to Unifi from Orbi, and man, Orbi worked awesome for seamless handoff between access points. On Unifi, it sometimes took ages before my clients switched to the nearest access point. After months of fiddling around, I think I’ve got it very close to how Orbi used to roam. You can follow the steps below to see if this works for you as well. These are all written according to Unifi Controller v6.5.53.

Steps

  1. Disable the “New User Interface” in Unifi controller. (Settings -> System -> New User Interface)
  2. Disable all “Beta” labled features for you wifi network. At the time of writing, these are: Fast roaming and High performance devices
  3. Disable WPA3 (use WPA2). This is in my experience the biggest blocker for seamless roaming
  4. Enable Multicast enhancement
  5. Enable BSS transition
  6. Enable Proxy ARP
  7. Disable any data rate controls
  8. On the individual access points:
    • Set 5Ghz Transmit power to High
    • Set 2.4Ghz Transmit power to Medium
    • Disable “Enable Minimum RSSI”
    • Band steering can be set to 5GHz (optional)

After all these steps, your clients should roam in a couple of seconds or so. Of course, the placement of the access points also matters. Make sure there’s not a lot of overlap between the access points.

Hopefully, this solves roaming issues for you as well. Let me know if this worked for you!