Comment by Wowfunhappy
7 days ago
> and for whatever reason 2.4ghz only devices cant find the SSID unless you if there is a name conflict on the 5ghz frequency
Huh? Is this true? It doesn’t make intuitive sense to me—if the device doesn’t have a 5ghz radio I would expect it to be physically impossible for the 5ghz network to interfere.
It's called Band Steering and it messes up older devices. Its truely an L direction that the wifi industry has gone, its a reaction to overcrowding of the 2.4Ghz spectrum by automatically moving capable devices to the 5Ghz SSID
so happens that its not backwards compatible very well to 2.4Ghz only devices. Not because of the frequency itself but because of the band steering implementation from the router
Can you explain? Is the router not actually sending out the 2.4Ghz network, or sending it at too low power?
its complex, I've read about why it messes them up, but I'd have to recommend looking up a primary source with the knowledge of the protocol name now
I've had this issue too on older devices, until I made the SSIDs different by suffixing 2ghz and 5ghz to each one. I think I've had it happen both on an older Android and older MacBook but it was a while ago, could be misremembering.
I think enough of us were running dual-band networks sharing the same SSID back in the day that doing so now cannot be the entire reason for things not working.
"band steering" implementation from the router side is the issue
> Huh? Is this true? It doesn’t make intuitive sense to me—if the device doesn’t have a 5ghz radio I would expect it to be physically impossible for the 5ghz network to interfere.
It's not an issue with the device itself, it's an issue with the device setup process.
For whatever reason, I assume it's easier in some common device platform, a lot of IoT devices do not use the SSID for discovering WiFi APs. Instead they connect directly to the BSSID (read: WiFi MAC) of the specific radio on the AP. These devices always rely on a phone app for setup, and the phone app has you select the WiFi network by the SSID name, but passes the BSSID to the device over Bluetooth.
When your phone is connected to the 5 GHz (or now 6 GHz) radio as would be normal for a modern device in a combined network, the BSSID it sees is invisible to the 2.4-only IoT device and thus it doesn't work unless you force your phone to only see the 2.4 GHz radio.
The problem also comes up if you have a larger network with multiple access points, set up a device, and then move it (or if your phone just happens to be hanging on to a more distant AP that the IoT device's puny antenna can't see).
It's been a stupid problem from the beginning, it'd be trivial to solve permanently in software if these device vendors would get their heads out of their collective asses, and yet the "you have to disable 5GHz" nonsense persists for the same reason as software vendors still insist on admin privileges for everything, any/any firewall rules, etc.