We’ve been having issues with our MC40 scanners in that their wifi is “sticky” and hangs onto the first Access Point they connect to, even if they’re moved to a location with a closer AP, so signal drops and we lose connection. Rebooting the devices in their final location seems to help but occasionally a device is very sticky and still finds its former AP, as long as it is viewable on the network.
Has anybody else run into this issue, and if so, how did you resolve it? It’s becoming a source of frustration for our FOH folks.
Thanks,
Jeanne DeVore | Technology Manager Chicago Shakespeare Theater
Are the WiFi networks from the various APs named the same or differently?
Speaking based on general networking experience (and never having used the MC40), wifi antennas are supposed to pretty seamlessly roam between different APs with the same name, presuming they're all on the same subnet as well. The antenna and driver can see all of the APs in range, and if they all have the same name, it'll just pick the one it has the strongest signal for.
If you have your APs all named differently, then you're dealing with a higher level of abstraction when you probably don't want to. The operating system thinks each wifi network with a different name is an entirely different network, so when you told it to connect to Network A, it's going to keep trying to maintain that connection until it falls below a threshold, and then try the next one in its prioritized list of previous networks.