Should I switch to 5GHz band?

[Gat Pelsinger]

I have a 100 Mbit connection, but I only seem to achieve that through wired connection. With Wi-Fi, I get about 50 Mbps on average, literally half the speed. So, should I switch to 5GHz band? I do sit a bit far from my router, with doors in the way, but you know, it's still in the same house. Also, I can't seem to access my router's settings by just entering my IPv4 address in the search bar. What do I do?

[Sjaakie]

Can't you just try it out? Or does your router / access point not support it currently?

 

What is the ip address you are using?

[DrMacintosh]

What model of router do you have? Also, 2.4GHz is going to be better at going through walls but the interference surrounding that channel makes it hard to use reliably. 

 

5GHz is worth a shot but in all likelihood, a new router and/or a mesh wifi system might be what you need.

[r00tb33r]

1 minute ago, DrMacintosh said:

mesh wifi system

I've had crap experience with 802.11ac mesh systems.  Even on newer revision I couldn't get any more than 90Mbit speed even through gateways, meanwhile the old Asus 802.11ac router smokes them.

 

I recommend 5GHz band and a decent router, at least 802.11ac.

[DrMacintosh]

9 minutes ago, r00tb33r said:

I've had crap experience with 802.11ac mesh systems.

I use the Linksys Velop MX4200. It's a wifi 6 system, works great. Range is nothing special but the coverage with two nodes is good and the nodes themselves are feature rich.

[r00tb33r]

9 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

I use the Linksys Velop MX4200. It's a wifi 6 system, works great. Range is nothing special but the coverage with two nodes is good and the nodes themselves are feature rich.

I got coverage but not speed.  What are your speed tests like?

 

At my townhome which is tall but has a small footprint I just use one Ubiquiti U6 Enterprise (WiFi 6E) access point, I saturate the 1Gbit link on the 6GHz band, but that's not a mesh, but a single access point.

 

That's another option actually, doing a high-end access point without doing meshing, but what's the point if you can just get a similarly capable router for less money.  I had an existing ceiling situation so that's the reason why I did it that way.

 

The two generations of Openmesh 802.11ac mesh systems I tried at my parents' house are nothing but straight crap in terms of throughput and repeater uptime (2 gateways and 1 repeater).  The newer A60 access points maxed out at 90Mbit, usually in the 80s, the older AC1750 models only did about 60Mbit at best.

 

After such a bad experience with 2 generations of hardware I have no more faith in mesh systems.

[DrMacintosh]

38 minutes ago, r00tb33r said:

What are your speed tests like?

I have the main node positioned on the second floor in a closet where the fiber connection comes in and my home server lives, it will get the full 500/500 speed of our connection to the whole floor.

 

The downstairs unit is positioned at the end of the living room. It's connected to the main node via wireless back-haul. It covers the guest bathroom, a small office, the backyard, and small portion of the front yard. That node tends to only get around 300/300 and falls from there as you leave its range.

 

Wifi 6 and 6E mesh systems, specifically tri-band routers, are very good. My, and other tri-band systems have either 2.4/5/5 GHz radios (wifi 6) or 2.4/5/6 GHz radios (wifi 6E). When using Wireless back haul, either a 5GHz or 6GHz band will be fully/nearly fully dedicated to the mesh system. 

[r00tb33r]

The back-haul sounds like an interesting feature.  That's quite a bit of coin though.