Does the Fast Transition feature work when using WPA2-Personal encryption? I read somewhere (not on Peplink site) that Fast Transition (aka Fast Roaming) only works with WPA2-Enterprise and RADIUS. Please advise.
I can say anecdotally that when I turned it on, all of a sudden devices shifted between my 3 APs and attached properly to the closest AP and I’m running WPA2-Personal AES. I was so happy this feature worked because I was struggling with devices connecting to the farthest AP all the time… IE the devices initial AP selection criteria/programming sucked and when I turned on fast roaming, all of a sudden the devices started to move appropriately to the closest AP, so something about fast roam gave the clients the ability to evaluate multiple APs and make a better decision.
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Appears the Fast Transition feature is not available for SSID that are open (not secure). That is the case with most guest networks. Is there a technical reason the feature would not work without encryption?
Fast transition is the standard defined for the 801.11r to reduce the association process when roam from 1 AP to another 1 AP.
For more information how “Fast Transition” association process work please refer to the URL below:
Generally “Open” association SSIDs doesn’t go through the above process and by design it’s not secure if you freely roaming to second AP, hence most of the Operating System (OS) is blocking you to connect to second AP even the same SSID (open) is used. Just give a example if hacker can easily setting up a SSIDs and treat your device to roam to the SSIDs that will be very dangerous that all your data will be leak out when connect to the AP. Hence. it’s a standard for “Open” SSID such feature will not even being considerate.
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That is the exact article I was originally referring to. And it implies that Fast Roaming only works with WPA-Enterprise & RADIUS. But, I believe, in Peplink’s case, Fast Transition works with both WPA-Personal and WPA-Entertprise. I am just trying to confirm that this is indeed the case.
The 802.11r standard actually refer to WPA2/3 (Personal) and WAP2 Enterprise.
Refer to the above link:
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Ah, how did I miss that reference?! Thank you for pointing it out. I am glad to have confirmed that Peplink’s Fast Transition does apply to WPA-Personal. I have just implemented it using a Balance One with AP One Ruggeds and it has greatly improved iOS device handoffs.
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Hi @Legionetz ,
Quick question, did you reset client signal thresholds to unlimited on all your APs?
I’m playing around with client signal thresholds on each AP (b20x and 2 ap minis)… but struggling to find the right balance. I do have fast transition enabled.
Interesting. I set mine as well to test and my device connections were all over the place.
Sounds like you are doing things similar to me. I am using a local AP controller, and it looks like you are using InControl.
I looked over all your channel settings, and they look pretty well defined at first glance. I don’t see any obvious conflicting channels - kudos, that took me way too long to figure out. Lol. It amazes me how dense I can be sometimes.
My point - I never had to mess with any of the thresholds on any of my APs. My portable devices are able to move freely and transition from one area to another without issue. Actually, that may be the only setting that I didn’t touch. I also found that Auto for the power settings works well - provided you don’t have channel overlap.
I remember when changing my encryption from WPA/WPA2 to WPA2/WPA3 - there were some clients that needed to re-learn the network - they just bounced from one AP to the next on each band, until they finally gave up. Everything worked as expected ever since “forgetting” the wifi network and setting it up again.
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