Purchased two NetGear WAG102s and I must roam!

snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com hath wroth:

Roam was not built in a day.

The problem is that 802.11b/g have no provisions for roaming. There's no provision for magically selecting the "best" access point, scanning for better access points, or even selecting a specific access point by MAC address from among those from a specific SSID. Eventually,

802.11r (fast roaming) will solve the problem, but that's not going to be approved until perhaps Mar 2007: Meanwhile, different vendors have applied various proporietary tweaks and fixes. Intel Proset has adjustable "presistence". Cisco has WCS for roaming. Some others are available, but none are a universal solution.

Autocell is not designed to impliment seamless roaming. All it does is dynamically change RF channels to minimize interference. This allows you to deploy access points without the usual careful channel planning.

I haven't tested extensively, but try a program called "WiFiHopper."

Thanks Jeff. That was a good one! =) (Rome. Ha!) Your response has answered more questions than three hours of Googling and searching through NetGear's site. I hope you have a good day.

See:

$20 to register. No mention of roaming anywhere in the docs or faq. It does show access points by MAC address instead of just the SSID. This is good progress. Unless I missed something, it's just another wireless client manager.

The "hopping" part really seems to deal with open access points, not individual access points with a common SSID. See:

I also note that it only runs on Windoze XP and requires: "WiFi Hopper cannot run correctly if Intel® PROSet/Wireless Software is installed. Please uninstall any other OEM WLAN management utilities before using WiFi Hopper." Since all my laptops are W2K or Linux, I guess I can't try it.