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> tell people (specifically my neighbors for example) that they will get faster speeds if they use the “5G” network exposed by their wifi router Of course you
by NavinF 5y ago
> tell people (specifically my neighbors for example) that they will get faster speeds if they use the “5G” network exposed by their wifi router
Of course you get higher speeds on 5ghz! How is this controversial?
Most people are still on 802.11ac which only works on 5ghz. It's also impossible to find a free channel on 2.4ghz unless you live in the woods so you'd be sharing airtime with the 10 other APs and all their clients on one of the 3 non-overlapping channels in the 2.4ghz band. On 5ghz you can easily run 80mhz channels instead of just barely getting a stable connection on 20mhz.
- chrismorgan 5y agoNear the edge of a signal’s range, its performance and reliability can plummet as signal loss causes trouble. 5GHz has a much lower effective range than 2.4GHz. Thus, there are areas where the 5GHz network will be available, but perform far worse than the 2.4GHz, even with congested 2.4GHz. (Still worse, in some devices it can cause persistent problems until reboot. My last laptop, a Surface Book, had a Realtek chip, and I was using it near the edge of a router’s range for hours a day last year, and every few days it’d get into a broken state where packet loss was >20% and latency a few hundred milliseconds, even if I moved right next to the router. Connecting to different networks wouldn’t fix it; sleeping the laptop wouldn’t fix it; disabling and reenabling the thing in Device Manager would normally but not quite always fix it; rebooting would always fix it.)
- NavinF 5y agoYeah that sucks. Good WiFi performance pretty much requires having an AP every other room. Besides your hardware problems and signal power loss, devices don't cooperate to share spectrum and can't see all the nodes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_node_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_node_problem