I have two Wireless Access Points, same SSID, but different frequency. Both APs have access lists enforced and I use this to ensure that the load is properly balanced across the two APs.

What I'm seeing from time to time is that a station would repeatedly attempt to connect to an AP even if rejected and eventually connect to the AP has it on it's access list; sometimes this can take 10+ minutes.

The assumption here is that when a station is rejected, it starts scanning the frequency range from bottom up all over again and is rejected repeatedly if the first AP in the range (from the bottom) does not accept it. Also guessing that the eventual acceptance of the station by the second AP is because in the first pass, the station did not see the AP that does not have it on the ACL?

Thoughts? Can someone help explain this for me? Anything I can do to speed up the reset process when all stations get disconnected (i.e. Power Issues).

Using a different SSID would be to tedious to manage... :/

Bump.

Sent from my Pixel 2 using Tapatalk

The client devices are very simple minded. They scan for the SSID and choose an AP with the strongest signal at the time and try to associate. If they are rejected they try associating to the same AP again. They don't "learn" from rejections, because the assumption is that all BSSIDs for the same SSIDs are equal, which doesn't apply in your configuration.

What do you mean by tediousness in managing two SSIDs? In your configuration there is no failover, since the other AP won't accept the other's clients. I can't see any advantage in nominally sharing the same SSID. Use different SSIDs and the clients will associate with the correct AP at once.