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That's sounds like a good concept: I'm no stranger to cheap IoT devices chewing up local 2.4GHz bandwidth with chatter and I have a lot of that going on. But

by ssl-3 1y ago

That's sounds like a good concept: I'm no stranger to cheap IoT devices chewing up local 2.4GHz bandwidth with chatter and I have a lot of that going on. But does it matter in 2025? As a broad concept: Ever since my last Sonos device [that they didn't deliberately brick] died, I don't have any even vaguely bandwidth-intensive devices left in my world that are 2.4GHz-only. Whatever laptop I have this year prefers the 5GHz network, and has for 20 years. My phone, whatever it is today, does as well and has for 15 years. My CCwGTV Chromecast would also prefer hanging out on the 5GHz network if it weren't plugged into the $12 ethernet switch behind the TV. Even things like the Google Home Mini speakers that I buy on the used market for $10 or $15 seem to prefer using 5GHz 802.11ac, and do so at a reasonably-quick (read: low-airtime) modulation rate. The only time I spend with my phone or tablet or whatever on the singular 2.4GHz network I have is when I'm at the edge of what I can reach with my access points -- like, when I visit the neighbors or something, where range is more important than speed and 2.4GHz tends to go a wee bit further. So the only things I have left in normal use that requires a 2.4GHz network are IoT things like smart plugs and light bulbs and other small stuff like my own little ESP/Pi Zero W projects that require so little bandwidth that the contention doesn't matter. (I mean... the ye olde Wii console and PSP handheld only do 2.4GHz, but they don't have much to talk about on the network anymore and never really did even in the best of times.) It's difficult to imagine that others' wifi devices aren't in similar form, because there's just not much stuff left out there in the world that's both not IoT and that can't talk at 5GHz. I can see some merit to having a separate IoT VLAN with its own SSID where that's appropriate (just to prevent their little IoT fingers from ever reaching out to the rest of the stuff on my LAN and discovering how insecure it may be), but that's a side-trip from your suggestion wherein the impetus is just logical isolation -- not spectral isolation. So yes, of course: Build out a robust wireless network. Make it awesome -- and use it for stuff. But unless I'm missing something, it sounds like building two separate-but-parallel 2.4GHz networks is just an exercise in solving a problem that hasn't really existed for a number of years.

ipython 1y ago
There is no non-IoT 2.4ghz network in my design. All "fast" devices are on a 5ghz only network. The only 2.4ghz network is dedicated to IoT devices. This also eliminates the need for devices to hunt and roam between 5ghz and 2.4ghz unnecessarily. Just need to balance tx power to make sure the 5ghz handoffs are as smooth as possible between APs.
bxparks 1y ago
You are lucky. In 2025 I have to run most of my 20-30 wifi devices on 2.4 GHz because 5 GHz won't penetrate the walls in my house, especially diagonally. My dev laptop is about 10 m (30 ft) away from the wifi access point, but goes through about 6 walls diagonally, due to some weird layout, and 2.4 GHz is way faster. The house has some thick walls. Same with phones. As soon as I'm in a different room, 2.4 GHz is faster. So I just keep things on 2.4. Yeah, I've been planning to wire the house with Cat-6 into every room and add some access points. It's been on the backlog for 6 years..
- ssl-3 1y ago
  I've lived in houses like that. My last house, which was rather small (by midwestern American standards, anyway) had some interior walls that were very good at blocking 5GHz transmissions. (I never took them apart to look, but I suspect that some of them had plaster with metal lath as one or more layers.) I started with one access point downstairs at the front (because that's where the cable modem lived) but it didn't work so well upstairs, at the back (diagonally) in the room I was using as an office. So I added another access point upstairs at the back and that fixed it: Wifi became solid-enough both upstairs and down, and also covered the entire back yard, and also worked great for the neighbors when they asked if they could borrow a cup of Internet. It took some literal gymnastics in some very weird normally-unseen spaces to accomplish that run, but it got done. :) As an side: It's interesting that being blocked by walls is also part of what makes 5GHz wifi so speedy indoors (in addition to having a lot more spectrum to use), for many [not all] people. By being attenuated so well by walls, the co-channel interference from the neighbors is reduced rather dramatically. With neighbors nearby, the RF environment tends to be a lot quieter at 2.4GHz than at 5GHz. --- Present-day house is a bit lucky: All of the thirsty tech is on the first floor, and it's very simple to get ethernet cables routed 'round in the basement (it's all utility space). I was able to find enough pre-existing holes in the floor (from old cable TV installs and also floor-mounted outlets that have been removed and covered) that getting ethernet to every useful area of every first-floor room with tech in it was a very simple ordeal that did not require a drill. (Yeah, that means that there's a wire poking up through the floor behind the desk I'm sitting at right now instead of a tidy RJ45 receptacle on a wall plate with a nice port designation label. I'm over it; it works perfectly and inertia is a hell of a drug.) But I'm not completely "lucky." The present house has aluminum siding and low-E windows. It's a great house that is amazingly inexpensive to heat and cool for how old it is, but it has aluminum siding and low-E windows and approximates a somewhat-leaky Faraday cage. Thus, my cell phone barely works indoors, but it works great outside. And wifi barely works outside on the porch (front or back, doesn't matter), and really not at all beyond the porch (but things like my phone think that it should work, which is problematic). I worked around that well-enough for the detached garage and back yard area by adding another access point in the garage, configured as a wireless repeater. Its advantage is that it has antennas that are optimized to work well, instead of some that are optimized to be very small (like those inside my phone, or my laptop). It's identical to the one inside the house and gets OK signal to/from the main AP, which it has a visual line-of-sight to through a couple of windows. As an impromptu solution made from stuff I already had leftover from the last place, it works. I'm not winning any speed records with that remote access point... but it seems to be reliable, and reliability is good. (Maybe some day I'll actually get around to upgrading the electricity to the garage to support some easy-to-access rooftop solar and/or car charging and/or welding and/or something, and when that trenching happens I'll also drop in some single-mode fiber. A single run of pre-terminated fiber is very cheap to buy, the "optics" at the endpoints are very inexpensive, and it is very safe with its essentially-absolute electrical isolation. It feels like overkill, but it's also once and done.)

by ssl-3 1y ago

ipython 1y ago

There is no non-IoT 2.4ghz network in my design. All "fast" devices are on a 5ghz only network. The only 2.4ghz network is dedicated to IoT devices. This also eliminates the need for devices to hunt and roam between 5ghz and 2.4ghz unnecessarily. Just need to balance tx power to make sure the 5ghz handoffs are as smooth as possible between APs.

bxparks 1y ago

You are lucky. In 2025 I have to run most of my 20-30 wifi devices on 2.4 GHz because 5 GHz won't penetrate the walls in my house, especially diagonally. My dev laptop is about 10 m (30 ft) away from the wifi access point, but goes through about 6 walls diagonally, due to some weird layout, and 2.4 GHz is way faster. The house has some thick walls. Same with phones. As soon as I'm in a different room, 2.4 GHz is faster. So I just keep things on 2.4. Yeah, I've been planning to wire the house with Cat-6 into every room and add some access points. It's been on the backlog for 6 years..

ssl-3 1y ago
I've lived in houses like that. My last house, which was rather small (by midwestern American standards, anyway) had some interior walls that were very good at blocking 5GHz transmissions. (I never took them apart to look, but I suspect that some of them had plaster with metal lath as one or more layers.) I started with one access point downstairs at the front (because that's where the cable modem lived) but it didn't work so well upstairs, at the back (diagonally) in the room I was using as an office. So I added another access point upstairs at the back and that fixed it: Wifi became solid-enough both upstairs and down, and also covered the entire back yard, and also worked great for the neighbors when they asked if they could borrow a cup of Internet. It took some literal gymnastics in some very weird normally-unseen spaces to accomplish that run, but it got done. :) As an side: It's interesting that being blocked by walls is also part of what makes 5GHz wifi so speedy indoors (in addition to having a lot more spectrum to use), for many [not all] people. By being attenuated so well by walls, the co-channel interference from the neighbors is reduced rather dramatically. With neighbors nearby, the RF environment tends to be a lot quieter at 2.4GHz than at 5GHz. --- Present-day house is a bit lucky: All of the thirsty tech is on the first floor, and it's very simple to get ethernet cables routed 'round in the basement (it's all utility space). I was able to find enough pre-existing holes in the floor (from old cable TV installs and also floor-mounted outlets that have been removed and covered) that getting ethernet to every useful area of every first-floor room with tech in it was a very simple ordeal that did not require a drill. (Yeah, that means that there's a wire poking up through the floor behind the desk I'm sitting at right now instead of a tidy RJ45 receptacle on a wall plate with a nice port designation label. I'm over it; it works perfectly and inertia is a hell of a drug.) But I'm not completely "lucky." The present house has aluminum siding and low-E windows. It's a great house that is amazingly inexpensive to heat and cool for how old it is, but it has aluminum siding and low-E windows and approximates a somewhat-leaky Faraday cage. Thus, my cell phone barely works indoors, but it works great outside. And wifi barely works outside on the porch (front or back, doesn't matter), and really not at all beyond the porch (but things like my phone think that it should work, which is problematic). I worked around that well-enough for the detached garage and back yard area by adding another access point in the garage, configured as a wireless repeater. Its advantage is that it has antennas that are optimized to work well, instead of some that are optimized to be very small (like those inside my phone, or my laptop). It's identical to the one inside the house and gets OK signal to/from the main AP, which it has a visual line-of-sight to through a couple of windows. As an impromptu solution made from stuff I already had leftover from the last place, it works. I'm not winning any speed records with that remote access point... but it seems to be reliable, and reliability is good. (Maybe some day I'll actually get around to upgrading the electricity to the garage to support some easy-to-access rooftop solar and/or car charging and/or welding and/or something, and when that trenching happens I'll also drop in some single-mode fiber. A single run of pre-terminated fiber is very cheap to buy, the "optics" at the endpoints are very inexpensive, and it is very safe with its essentially-absolute electrical isolation. It feels like overkill, but it's also once and done.)