Better to spread devices across 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands or all on one? Does it matter?

[fuzzyreets]

Hi folks. I just purchased a Netgear Nighthawk yesterday and I am VERY glad I did so. I'm wondering if I should ONLY put my stream demanding devices on the 5Ghz and the other stuff I don't care about on the 2.4Ghz band. I'm wondering if having more devices on 5Ghz AC matters or I should spread it out across the two. Mainly keeping my stuff on 5Ghz and my wife and misc on the 2.4Ghz Thanks.

 

[bill001g]

Trying to spread your devices tends to be very tricky to accomplish. This would be very hard even if you were talking about placing devices into 2 hardwired switches. Your goal of course is to use all the available bandwidth on both radios. If all your devices are 802.11ac capable your total throughput it higher. This means it "should" be able to support more devices. It gets almost impossible to really figure out since wireless devices tend to not play well together. They are suppose to avoid transmitting over each other but the more you run the more chance you take for it to happen. Of course you have no control over what your neighbors are doing which is what makes it impossible to really get a consistent result from any design.

Generally 5g has been the preferred method to avoid interference. There are more channels so you could generally find one that nobody else was using. Now 802.11ac comes along and wants to use 4 channels rather than 1. There are only 9 total that are not subject to having to shut themselves down if they detect weather radar. So 2 users running 802.11ac use all the channels and the 3rd users has no choice but to interfere with one of the other 2. The new version of 802.11ac coming later this year users 8 channels so now only 1 person can use 802.11ac.

Still it may not make a huge difference which devices you put on which bands. If you all your traffic goes to the internet you ISP connection will likely limit you before you get a lot of interference between your own devices. The bandwidth of a single radio band is more than most people have from their ISP. I would still use both bands though but how you split them I suspect is going to be a matter of trial and error to see what works best for you in your house and in your neighborhood.

 

[fuzzyreets]

Trying to spread your devices tends to be very tricky to accomplish. This would be very hard even if you were talking about placing devices into 2 hardwired switches. Your goal of course is to use all the available bandwidth on both radios. If all your devices are 802.11ac capable your total throughput it higher. This means it "should" be able to support more devices. It gets almost impossible to really figure out since wireless devices tend to not play well together. They are suppose to avoid transmitting over each other but the more you run the more chance you take for it to happen. Of course you have no control over what your neighbors are doing which is what makes it impossible to really get a consistent result from any design.

Generally 5g has been the preferred method to avoid interference. There are more channels so you could generally find one that nobody else was using. Now 802.11ac comes along and wants to use 4 channels rather than 1. There are only 9 total that are not subject to having to shut themselves down if they detect weather radar. So 2 users running 802.11ac use all the channels and the 3rd users has no choice but to interfere with one of the other 2. The new version of 802.11ac coming later this year users 8 channels so now only 1 person can use 802.11ac.

Still it may not make a huge difference which devices you put on which bands. If you all your traffic goes to the internet you ISP connection will likely limit you before you get a lot of interference between your own devices. The bandwidth of a single radio band is more than most people have from their ISP. I would still use both bands though but how you split them I suspect is going to be a matter of trial and error to see what works best for you in your house and in your neighborhood.

Thank you very much for your detailed reply. my next question is if I mix Wireless N only devices on five gigahertz with wireless ac devices on five gigahertz will the fact that I have wireless N only devices on the five gigahertz band bring down the speed to the AC devices?

 

[bill001g]

To a small extent it will but the router already switches between the various 802.11n encoding between different users already. Since the session may be negotiated at different speeds it has to quickly switch. I suspect the overhead of running multiple users itself is more than how the data is sent. The radio chipset manufactures are very secretive about how they managed to pull this off. 802.11n is a subset of 802.11ac it is not like the old 802.11b/g problems.