Why does my phone stay connected to the far mesh node?

This is called sticky client behaviour and it is not a fault in your mesh. It is a deliberate design choice in the device: switching access point costs a brief interruption, so devices are conservative about doing it. The result is a phone that walks upstairs, keeps talking to the node in the hall, and reports one bar while sitting a metre from a node that would give it full speed.

Step by step

1. Confirm which node the device is actually on.Most mesh apps show each connected device and the node it is using, sometimes with a signal figure. Check it from the place where the problem occurs, with the device in your hand.
2. Use the instant fix.Turn wifi off on the device, wait a couple of seconds and turn it on. It rejoins by scanning fresh and picking the strongest node. This works every time and takes five seconds — for many people it is the whole answer.
3. Check node placement rather than blaming the device.Nodes placed too close together give devices no clear winner, so they stay put. The pools of coverage should overlap modestly at their edges, not sit deep inside each other. Moving a node further out usually helps more than any setting.
4. Wire the nodes if you possibly can.A wirelessly linked node spends half its airtime relaying traffic back to the main unit, which halves throughput and makes a sticky device's poor connection worse. An ethernet cable to each node removes that entirely and is the single biggest improvement available.
5. Enable the roaming and steering features your system has.Look for 802.11k, 802.11v and 802.11r, sometimes presented as fast roaming or smart connect. These let the network suggest a better node to a device that supports them. They help; they cannot force an unwilling device to move.
6. Consider disabling band steering for problem devices.Some systems let you keep specific devices on one band. A device that flips between bands and nodes unpredictably is sometimes better pinned to 5 GHz.
7. Update the firmware on the mesh.Roaming behaviour is one of the things manufacturers genuinely improve in firmware. If the system has been on the same version for two years, update it.
8. Check whether the device is the odd one out.If one laptop misbehaves and everything else roams properly, the problem is that device's wireless driver or its power-saving settings, not the mesh. Update the driver and check for an aggressive power-saving mode on the adapter.

Tips

• A weak device does not just run slowly itself — it takes far longer to send the same data, which occupies the radio and slows every other device on that node. Fixing a sticky device improves the whole network.
• Signal bars on a phone are a coarse indicator. If your mesh app reports a signal figure in dBm, treat anything worse than about -70 as a connection that will feel poor.
• Do not add more nodes to fix stickiness. More nodes closer together makes the choice more marginal and the behaviour worse.

Questions people ask