How do I make my phone connect to one of two wifi points when both are within range?
Basically, I have an extender for the garden but whenever I go to the garden, my phone remains connected to the extender when I'm back in the house and I can always tell because everything is always slower to load when connecting through it.
How can I make my devices strongly prefer to connect to one SSID when both are there?
This usually means the transmit power on your WiFi access points is too strong. The problem is that the way the current wifi protocol standards are written and implemented, most devices will just hang onto a wifi connection for as long as the connection is still functioning even if there is a superior alternate access point to connect to that's closer and faster. If you imagine drawing a map of your property, plotting the location of your wifi access points, and then drawing a virtual circle around them that represents wifi coverage, then you want as little overlap as possible between access points, and you do this by intelligent/strategic placement and by adjusting down the transmit power of the access points. There's free utilities you can download to your device to help you map out these rings. Although some less expensive and less configurable access points probably don't offer the the ability to change transmit power, prosumer and enterprise gear do. Some signal overlap between access points is unavoidable if you want to also completely eliminate all deadspots on your property, but with minimal overlap your device should be dropping a distant access point as you move out of range and pick up the closer one with the strong signal.
Most people think more power equals more better when it comes to access point signal strength but that's not really how it works because WiFi is 2-way communication and your mobile device is always gong to be the weak link because it has the weaker transmitter. There's no reason to broadcast a maximum strength signal from an access point if you have more than one of them.
Much has been written/documented on this topic and you should have enough keywords in the previous two paragraphs to find all the expert instructions for doing it that you could possibly need.
Yes
Are they both using the same SSID or sperate?
If you search your phone for wifi priority you can set a preference.
If the same SSID, it should automatically swap to the highest connection strength AP. Depending on the networking hardware you might beable to addjust single strength. They could be overlapping, and reducing singal overlap may help the phone determine what AP it wants a bit easier.
Agree with reducing power. A common mistake when using multiple access points is to set them all to full power.
Devices usually don't constantly look for a better signal, instead they look for alternatives once the current connection quality is bad. Some devices will hold on for dear life until it's borderline unusable.
Unless you're looking for redundancy, the best case scenario is to have only one good option in every area of your home. That's not always possible, especially where they overlap, but the closer you can get to that ideal, the more likely it is that your device will make the switch.
You should also be able to adjust the backhaul power separately, so you don't have connectivity issues between the extender and router.
There's also the WiFi roaming sensitivity settings that I know at least Intel adapters have. I recall it being on the client side, but I'm definitely no expert.
Thanks for expanding on the knowledge. I was mainly speculating a bunch of stuff seeing limited information of the setup was provided. You explained that much better than myself.
Unfortunately, that is not part of any WiFi protocol standards. Never has been. It would be amazing if it were.
A few solution providers have bolted on their own proprietary junk to WiFi standards to kinda make this work, but it's generally expensive and still not flawless.
You can try and see if Tasker can turn Wi-Fi off and then back on when your extender's Wi-Fi signal is low.
I used to do this before switching to a mesh Wi-Fi setup.