20 MHz vs 40 MHz

[djdelarosa25]

I'm in an isolated area (only one neighbor's WiFi reaches but not everytime, sometimes two of them show up) and my router only supports 2.4 GHz. Should I go for 20 or 40 MHz?

[Leonard]

Try both and see which gives better coverage in your home and then use that, remember to reboot the router after any changes.

[skywake]

If there's more than one access point in range you should go with 20Mhz. If there isn't go with 40Mhz. Though bare in mind that for some reason some devices don't like to connect to a 40Mhz AP for whatever reason. That shouldn't be a problem but I have had issues with that in the past with some devices. Most of the time there's enough overlap of radios on 2.4Ghz that you have no choice but to go with 20Mhz.

 

But really, it's not so much about your network performance. It's just a good neighbour thing to set your network so it doesn't overlap with their's if possible. 

[djdelarosa25]

3 hours ago, skywake said:

If there's more than one access point in range you should go with 20Mhz. If there isn't go with 40Mhz. Though bare in mind that for some reason some devices don't like to connect to a 40Mhz AP for whatever reason. That shouldn't be a problem but I have had issues with that in the past with some devices. Most of the time there's enough overlap of radios on 2.4Ghz that you have no choice but to go with 20Mhz.

 

But really, it's not so much about your network performance. It's just a good neighbour thing to set your network so it doesn't overlap with their's if possible. 

 

What if the other AP is a WiFi repeater?

[skywake]

17 hours ago, djdelarosa25 said:

What if the other AP is a WiFi repeater?

Repeaters in general work with the same frequency and bandwidth as the signal they're repeating. It's the main reason why they're almost universally garbage. I say almost because there are some dual-band range extenders which use one radio for back-haul and another as just an access point. But even with those there's still one radio that's locked into whatever the base AP is doing.

 

tl;dr: With repeaters you're almost always using the one block of RF so it doesn't matter.