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Opinion: It's Time To Ditch 2.4GHz WI-FI (monero.town)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by shortwavesurfer@monero.town to c/technology@lemmy.world

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2.4GHz wifi is not suitable for two big reasons, interference and low bandwidth. 2.4GHz wifi in any kind of suburban or city environment and sometimes even in rural will be congested with other networks, microwaves, other appliances, etc causing massive speed degradation or fluctuations. The range of 2.4GHz is just too large for all the equipment that uses it in today's world. In my previous apartment complex for example my phone could see 35 distinct 2.4GHz wifi networks while only 3 at max can operate without interfering with each other. In that same building i could only see 13 5GHz networks. Which brings me to the second issue of bandwidth

2.4GHz at least here in the US only has channels 1, 6, and 11 that will not interfere with each other. if anyone puts their network between these three channels it will knock out both the one below and the one above. Channel 3 would interfere with both channels 1 and 6 for example. By going up to 5GHz you have many more free channels, fewer networks competing for those channels, and higher bandwidth channels allowing for much higher throughput. 2.4GHz allows 40MHz wide channels which in isolation would offer ~400mbps, but you will never see that in the real world.

Personally, i think OEMs should just stop including it or have it disabled by default and only enable it in an "advanced settings" area.

Edit: I am actually really surprised at how unpopular this opinion appears to be.

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[–] abhibeckert@lemmy.world 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Edit: I am actually really surprised at how unpopular this opinion appears to be.

2.4Ghz WiFi works perfectly for me, possibly because I'm not using an "OEM" access point - but rather went out and spent a couple hundred dollars on a good one myself. Both at home in the suburbs and at our office in the city with several businesses in one building, 2.4Ghz works great.

In my experience 5Ghz only has acceptable performance if you have an access point in every internal room. I have zero interest in setting that up and like the fact that I can have reliable internet on my entire suburban block with a single (good) access point.

"Upgrading" to 5Ghz would mean replacing one access point with eight access points. No thanks.

As for wanting 400mbps... wtf for? I have a 10Gbps connection (wired) at the office and 50Mbps (wifi, 2.4Ghz) at home. Honestly can't tell the difference. Sure, large downloads are faster... but that's not something I do often especially at home. And if I did want that, I wouldn't be using wireless. Latency is far more important than bandwidth and wired has better latency.