hornbyp wrote:

What is better, AP or Mesh?

My take, is that "Mesh" is an attempt at IEEE 802.11s , with a bit of Central Management thrown in.

IEEE 802.11s lets wireless repeaters talk to one another - potentially via intermediate nodes - without the need for the links to be manually defined. As far as I can see, it only starts to come into its own, when the area to be covered is so large, that several 'hops' are required. With one hop, from Mesh Root to Mesh Client, it's effectively just a WDS bridge. With wireless bridging, throughput is drastically reduced, unless there is a dedicated radio for the 'backhaul'. The AP903 doesn't have one. (Maybe you can use 5GHz for the backhaul and 2.4GHz for the clients?)

Wired 'mesh' mode is really nothing of the sort - it's just a centralised management tool. If at all possible, the answer is always wired Access Point mode :wink:

Are you sure you actually have dead-spots? ... and it's not a Roaming issue - where clients are refusing to let go of the first AP they saw? Are you using some kind of Survey Tool - or just reacting to the behaviour of your IOS devices?

In another forum, a poster was of the opinion that "Mesh" was better, because it helped get rid of this problem. I speculate that their particular Mesh implementation was using lower-powered nodes, which encourage the wireless client to look elsewhere. You can of course, (theoretically anyway!), alter the transmit power of Draytek Wifi products, to give this effect. The AP-assisted Roaming Assist options are also well worth exploring.

These are just my own prejudices and ramblings. Others may have different ideas :lol:

tazladd wrote:
... I have noticed IOS devices and macbooks on the wifi seem to timeout and just have full signal strength but not be able to perform any activity on the internet? Until I turn off wifi and turn it back on to allow it to reconnect.

What do you reckon this issue could be?

Draytek wrote:
Apple iOS Keep Alive can keep Wifi connection of iOS device by sending UDP port 5353 packets every 5 seconds.