I spent a long time recently setting pretty much this same thing up. When in my office my Android phone battery rapidly died, I guess because usteer kept trying to steer it or something. I ended up turning off usteer and 802.11r and just deal with slow roaming. Maybe I should try again with the static neighbor reports.

Question for the wifi experts in this thread...

What's a good off the shelf multipoint wifi system these days? I have Amazon's Eero right now and it's ok.

I'd love to go back to my linksys wrt54 roots but that's not in the cards currently..

I do a lot of work on very large Wi-Fi networks (i.e. hotel/apartment complexes with 80 to 500+ access points), for a very rough quick test of coverage quality and roaming performance, find a Ping app for your phone that allows you to set a super low interval (i.e. time between pings sent), and ping your gateway router (i.e. 192.168.1.1) and while that is running walk around your home/location. It’s important that the Ping app keeps sending pings even if they drop, i.e. it should just look like a waterfall/constant stream of fast pings that show you red/green pings and ideally a summary at the end. On iOS the app I tell people to use is called “Ping” with a blue icon, I usually have to share the link to the app as there are several with this name (I’m not on my phone currently or I would share the link) there are several ping apps that do offer this fast ping feature.

You can also "just" set the 802.11k entries manually. Add 802.11r and you should be mostly good. Usteer makes it slightly better by moving clients to the best AP when they stay stationary for longer whiles.

Cool! I dont need this anymore since im broke and moved to a 1 room apt. but yeah the ‘set the same ssid’ “trick” def. is not enough and often achieves the opposite effect.

Curious if you think usteer is viable without wired backhaul. I have two OpenWRT routers in different rooms in differnt part of the house and not possible to connect them by ethernet. Would the usteer overhead make things worse if they're just communicating over wifi?

Not to be that guy, but...

If you want multiple SSIDs, roaming, daily neighbor scanning and auto channel selection, etc, but don't like to spend hours tinkering with your equipment beyond the physical setup, then Ubiquiti UniFi equipment is great.

I stopped recommending UniFi around 2020 (several of their best engineers had left, and they made some dumb choices), but IMO they're back to being a decent choice. And I appreciate that they're become a one-stop solution for all home/SOHO as well as mid size enterprise IT needs.

With Wi-Fi 8 we will finally get steerable friendly roaming like cellular radio is doing for almost 40 years now.

This "here's a neighbor table, disassoc and fuck you&good luck"-method we must use right now is just super painful. It's super complicated to build reliable networks that way.

99% of what he did is not needed. Only 2 things are needed: enable fast roaming (FT), and change DTIM from the openwrt default of 2, to 3. That's all. No need to install usteer, extra hostapd fields. Nothing.

By lucky chance, while he set up usteer, he modified DTIM to 3 thus fixing the fast transition roaming, which doesn't work well on default openwrt because of DTIM. Especially Apple devices really hate DTIM=2 (they need the extra off-time given by DTIM to properly scan the other channels).

I'd used DAWN for band steering/roaming at my last place, which worked ok. uSteer is a little newer & is an official openwrt project. https://github.com/berlin-open-wireless-lab/DAWN https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/dawn DAWN has a wild amount of knobs to tune, which aren't super well described. I haven't been running it since a single AP covers my current place very well. But it would be interesting to go evaluate DAWN & it's config with an LLM, to dice in & see more. uSteer too.

Great write up, good information to share. This really is such an important next step for many people's wifi and it's documentation is pretty so-so.