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Did you know that you are probably connecting poorly to your home WiFi?

Maybe you haven’t noticed, but currently a router can offer more than one WiFi network. These networks operate at different frequencies and of course have quite different characteristics. Well, it is quite common for users to connect without looking and this causes them to misuse the WiFi.

Before connecting to WiFi, you should know this

For you to understand better, currently the Wi-Fi 5 and 6 routers offer two frequency bands: 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. Also, we may have a Wi-Fi router 6Ewhich is an enhancement to the WiFi 6 standard, which adds the 6.0 GHz band.

the band of 2.4 GHz was developed in 1999 for connection to the Internet without the need for cables in domestic environments. Currently, all routers continue to offer this connection band, since there are still many devices that are only compatible with this frequency.

router honor wifi 6

Until the advent of WiFi 5, the 5 GHz band was hardly used in the domestic sphere. Many routers, despite their power, did not offer support for this band before the arrival of WiFi 5. But, believe it or not, the band of 5 GHz was also developed in 1999although it did not begin to adopt massively until 2014.

Now, which one should I use and why? Well, the gang of 5GHz offers faster connections that the band of 2.4GHz. This translates into lower load times, especially important in games where latency or ping matters a lot.

But, now comes the bad part of this and it is coverage. the band of 5GHz makes use of shorter waves for the data transmission. This makes the signal attenuation when there are wallsfor example, is superior to the 2.4 GHz band. For this reason, the 2.4 GHz band offers better coverage than the 5 GHz band when there are more obstacles, such as walls.

wifi router 6

When should I connect to one or the other WiFi band?

All routers, unless we deactivate it, natively offer the two active bands. The 5 GHz band is easily discoverable, as it is usually identified by the name of the network followed by “_5G”. This tells us that we are connected to the WiFi network on the 5 GHz frequency.

Actually, there are few cases in which we need a 5 GHz connection. The first and most obvious case is when we play, since we need a high speed and low latency connection. It is also the connection we would use if we wanted to transfer large filesthus reducing transfer times.

From the smartphone we can use the 2.4GHz network if the 5 GHz coverage is not very good, we will hardly notice the difference. The SmartTV You can also connect to 2.4 GHz without problems, it shouldn’t be a big change either. It is also the ideal band for devices such as smart plugs, lights or cameras, among others.

The reality is that the connection to one or the other band of our WiFi network is usually quite indistinguishable. It will be noticeable in games and heavy file transfers, but little else. So, if you have a low WiFi connection in the living room, since the router signal must go through several walls, you should still switch to the 2.4 GHz band, since you will have better coverage (theoretically).

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