Something to consider as we increase our Alexa, Google, Siri, Bixby and other digital assistants at home – Especially my parents with their new Hotwire setup.
As my family knows, I have a ton of devices (about 50) on my home’s wifi and I was trying to figure out the best way to allocate the speed and coverage within my house. I decided to experiment with assigning the devices best suited for 2.4GHz to that SSID and the others to the 5GHz band. I noticed that all of my Wyze cameras, Ring doorbell, Nest smoke detectors, Printers, Vector robot and wifi outlets could only use 2.4GHz…so that was easy, I just gave that band a new SSID and password and forced them all to log into that address. The others, like laptops, desktops, Xbox, Phones, Google Chromecast, were better suited for faster speeds on 5GHz, so I left them as-is and they seem to be a lot happier with the extra bandwidth. What I don’t know yet is the Alexa / Google devices seem to prefer 5GHz, but not sure why they would need the faster speeds (expect for Amazon FireTV since it’s pushing my TV content), so I may force them to 2.4GHz also at some point.
Items to keep in mind:
2.4GHz is slower but has a longer range
5GHz is faster but has a shorter range
Your router must support sending out two bands (2.4GHz / 5GHz) simultaneously
Bottomline for me was that I appeared to be overfeeding some devices with 5GHz, when they didn’t really need it and underfeeding the guys with 2.4GHz who could use the faster speeds.
Oh yeah, you may say “But Mike, what about all the Sonos speakers?” – They actually create their own network and the “hub” is wired to the router. This is also true with the Phillips Hue lights – Hub is wired and they are on their own network.
Good luck getting you wifi under control and please seek guidance from the numerous sites out there providing support:
- https://www.tutorialspoint.com/wi-fi/index.htm
- https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/basics-of-wi-fi/
- https://www.ampedwireless.com/learningcenter/tutorials
- https://www.hackingtutorials.org/category/wifi-hacking-tutorials/
- https://lifehacker.com/the-10-best-ways-to-boost-your-home-wifi-5931743
- https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-upgrade-your-home-wi-fi-and-get-faster-internet/
De Lio Photo Blog 