That is not normal. Macs are very stable on the wifi side and will stay connected to 5Ghz unless your network had dropped. Could be your wifi is not stable or your Mac is too far away (anything more than 15m) probably, easy to check hold onto the option key and click on the wifi icon to look at the signal strength etc.

The new RSSI looks more normal numbers, its a false belief that over-powered Tx power is helpful unless the Rx gain can match. Macs stay connected for days if you leave it in the power source. Check your wifi log to see connect time as you monitor.

On AirPort routers previously, the power setting was at 25% sufficient without devices dropping off. Plus the nice benefit of not able to snoop on the wifi from outside Or the thought of scary high Tx power well above the most conservative recommendations.

If you are mostly on an Apple ecosystem, AirPort Extreme abiet not updated for a while are still the better option. Even Asus mesh technology does not support seamless roaming between routers which AirPorts does. Recently moved to Asus (which is decent) and the mis-adventure was not getting an UBNT/Mikrotik and using AirPorts for wireless. On this forum at times get excited not rebooting routers after 30 days, with AirPorts its never until you hit a power failure which could be a year. And firmware is rock solid. Your Macs should get gigabit wireless connectivity on 5Ghz with the Mikrotik router, limited by your broadband.

Was discussed years back on this forum with the network gurus here (who are not posting much since) that Unifi PPPoE changed one fine day from working and then not supported by AirPorts due to the updated manner the authentication handshake is handled. Therefore you need a Unifi supported router to handle the PPPoE authentication. Airports are now used in bridge mode to a Unifi supported router.

AirPorts uses a proprietary implementation of WDS without the half bandwidth penalty. Roaming or switching AP is unnoticed so maybe you are correct in this aspect from a strict definition.

The 802.11 Working Group standards k, r, and v let clients roam more seamlessly from access point (AP) to AP within the same network.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202628

Asus mesh does not support, at least on the latest firmware released yesterday, seamless roaming since its still bugged in some places. The handover between routers would need some pretty clever algorithms.

Edit
The challenge with Apple is they do not publish much the internals of what they implement. Would be a perfect solution if any vendor including UBNT/Mikrotik can provide seamless wireless mesh. Not keen to wire cat6 cables if can be avoided.

This post has been edited by XPS: Mar 18 2018, 02:23 AM

@squall0833
Not all wifi chips are created equal. The new chips from Broadcom has improved gain. High end routers should be able to manage what you described (chip + better antenna).

Not a fan of powerline. Mikrotik plus a good AP is probably more cost effective though if you can manage some technical configuration.

And lose all your ability to customise on Mikrotik?

Its all over again RSA then AES if you know the history. Open source in theory is the only safe approach as the codes can be verified, no hidden stuff etc

This post has been edited by XPS: Apr 23 2018, 09:02 PM

The real threat is more than firewall. Its how well protected the vendor firmware is on the download servers, development - test - release software controls, etc. Also how are clients within the internal network protected against an attack originating from an internal client.

Tomato not LEDE on RT-N16? Would be awesome to get your experiences with a network with LEDE, PiHole ad-blocker, some intrusion detection device. That's a project on the back burner for now until can find some time.