On which devices should i use 5GHz WiFi?

[AleksiDj73]

Hello everyone, my cousin will give me his router because he is moving to another country and he told me he would give it to me and that router has a 2.4 and a 5GHz band and my current router only has 2.4GHz which means i haven't used a 5GHz router before and i'll be kinda new to it and plus his router is new compared to my 4 years old router lol. Anyways, few months ago i actually had planned on my mind on which devices to use 2.4 or 5 but now i've completed forgotten and mixed everything up.

 

So, in my room i got an AC which has WiFi and a printer that also has WiFi. The room to the left is my parents room which has the same AC as mine. To the right of my room it's the kitchen with a Smart TV with ofc WiFi. Now should i use on those 4 devices 2.4GHz or 5? My theory was to use 2.4GHz on the 2 ACs and printer since they won't be doing anything wow and the TV to set it to 5GHz since YT and other services are used here and there and it may need that quick speed and idk if i got it right or not. Or maybe switch around and have the ACs and printer on 5GHz and the TV on 2.4 so the 2.4 isn't occupied by too many pointless devices. (Note: I haven't actually done proper searching to know if the ACs and printer support 5GHz so this thread will either be pointless or super useful lol. I will see myself in a few days time). Lastly everyone else will be using 2.4GHz (my mom, dad, brother, my spare phone) and i will be using the 5GHz on my main phone when wanna do something intensive and maybe on my laptop as well. Guests will use 2.4GHz ofc

 

What do you guys say? How should i set it up?

 

Also bear in mind that my room is in the middle of my parents room and kitchen which means the router will be placed on my room and the distance between the 2 rooms are like 5 meters at most so basically there is only a wall on both sides that's covering the other side and i know the 5GHz has a short range so yeah.

[Senzelian]

There is really not need to seperate the two bands. Devices will choose automatically to which they want to be connected to.

 

Of course you do have the option to seperate them and select a band for each device, but honestly I don't see the point. If you still want to go ahead with that, then I recommend to simply throw everything that does not require a high amount of bandwith onto the 2.4Ghz band. It's more stable and offers longer range at a reduced speed. But it is likely that even that reduced speed will be more than what your internet provider offers you anyway. Without any need for fast internal data transfer you'll likely not get any benefit out of seperating the bands. 

[Alex Atkin UK]

10 hours ago, Senzelian said:

There is really not need to seperate the two bands. Devices will choose automatically to which they want to be connected to.

 

Of course you do have the option to seperate them and select a band for each device, but honestly I don't see the point.

The point is, devices are not intelligent about how they choose which band to connect to.

 

Unless you have a Mesh setup, if you move out of range of 5Ghz and drop onto 2.4Ghz, the device will stay there forever until you manually force it back.  While splitting the bands doesn't avoid this, by having 5Ghz as the default/automatic and 2.4Ghz manually, it will at least not happen if you go slightly out of range then back in again.  I guess if a seamless connection is important to you, this might seem a negative though.

 

There are also cases where it might put you on 2.4Ghz because 5Ghz is a weak signal, but the speed would still actually be faster on 5Ghz.  Or you might want to keep some devices on 2.4Ghz to save 5Ghz for high-bandwidth devices only, as the more devices you have on an SSID, the higher the chance of performance issues.

 

Basically, combined bands are easier to use, but doing it manually with split bands often gets you the best performance.

[AleksiDj73]

19 hours ago, Senzelian said:

There is really not need to seperate the two bands. Devices will choose automatically to which they want to be connected to.

 

Of course you do have the option to seperate them and select a band for each device, but honestly I don't see the point. If you still want to go ahead with that, then I recommend to simply throw everything that does not require a high amount of bandwith onto the 2.4Ghz band. It's more stable and offers longer range at a reduced speed. But it is likely that even that reduced speed will be more than what your internet provider offers you anyway. Without any need for fast internal data transfer you'll likely not get any benefit out of seperating the bands. 

Thanks for the reply. Don't be so certain that devices will automatically connected to the reliable WiFi because most devices are dumb when it comes to this and they connect to whatever they want to and it's basically 50/50.

 

Of course i got option to separate or combine both 2.4 and 5GHz, i thought of that from the start but i don't want things to get clattered and i want to have a control on the devices. Like if i count all of my devices that connect to the WiFi daily here are these, my main phone, spare phone, my brother's phone, my mom, dad, my laptop, 2 ACs, 1 printer and my brother's tablet has WiFi (joins occasionally). Sometimes when there are guests, it's +2 most of the times or even +4 if we got a big night. That is a total of 10 devices and with the guests are 12-14. Like 10-14 devices joining simultaneously ain't little and it can cause a huge mess if the router cannot keep up.

 

I mean look, i will see for a couple of weeks how it will be with those 2 bands and if i don't see any improvement, i will just straight up combine both and connect everything in one network