John Rumm wrote:
But doesn't mesh mean that client devices will 'roam' transparently,
whereas adding wired WiFi access points won't do this (i.e. it's down
to the client, or me, to change WiFi connection).


Exactly.

Before we had the mesh system we had to have a homeplug Wi-Fi access point
in our bedroom to get adequate coverage there. The problem was though that
our bedroom is at the front of the house and our phones would always latch
on to it whenever we drove into the driveway. Wed find then that when
when we passed trough to the back of he house and our main living areas,
our phones would hang on like grim death to the bedroom access point
despite a much stronger signal from the router in the hall downstairs.

We were always having to manually switch our access from one to the other
manually. If got to be a real pain in the arse.

You can get round that a bit by enabling fast roaming on the APs if they
support it. It allows caching of credentials and makes handovers much
faster to different APs. Some also have a mechanism for an AP to boot a
client off if the link quality is suffering.

That's essentially what a mesh system does, plus it automatically sets
all the WiFi 'servers' to the same SSID and password.

As I understand it now (after quite a bit more reading aboout it)
there is nothing particularly special about a mesh system except that
it sets everything up to make it as easy as possible for client
systems to roam.

Adding APs 'manually' and setting them up with the same SSID and,
possibly configuring some of the 'advanced' defaults (if the user
interface allows it) to help roaming will get essentially the same
result as a mesh system.

--
Chris Green
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