iPhone don't roam through the mesh (cross posted)
Hi,
I have an Asus BT8 consisting of 3 nodes with an Ethernet backhaul at 2.5Gbps.
I have two SSIDs at home. The first for all phones, tablets, laptops, etc., and the second specifically for IoT, which is running on a separate VLAN with no access to the home network.
The home network runs all 3 bands on the same SSID, and the IoT network only runs a 2.4GHz. The reason why the main network still needs the 2.4 is because we have an old printer with only 2.4 capabilities.
5GHz band is relatively clean, and 6GHz is literally empty.
Everything works just fine, except the two iPhone 17s I have struggle really badly to roam through the mesh. They both get stuck to a specific node, and even if I turn on/off Wi-Fi on the phones, they only connect to the node they were connected to before despite having a much stronger signal on some other.
As per some other recommendations, I disabled MLO and, just in case, so the Wi-Fi7 (none of the devices at home support Wi-Fi7 anyway). I also configured Roaming Assistance so if signal drops below -65dB, the clients will try to connect to another node.
This change seemed to fix the roaming issue for a while, but since yesterday, I am back to square one. The Mac I am writing from now is connected just fine to the 6GHz band, and the RSSI is at -47dB. The iPhone literally right beside this very Mac still attempts to connect to the farthest mesh node in the house (the one which it was previously connected to) and will try to connect to that node unless I change the Private WiFi Address to something different, which effectively changes its MAC Address.
The router is running the latest firmware, and iPhones are running either iOS 26.4.1 or 26.5 beta with the same results.
At this point, I don't know what else to do to get this working as it should, and any advice from the experts would be greatly appreciated.