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Forum Discussion
Disable 5GHz
My printer only supports 2.4 GHz WiFi, but my Orbi system keeps steering it to 5 GHz. This causes the printer to go offline, fail to wake, and requires the Canon app to reconnect. My Orbi model does...
In my opinion the problem is shared between Netgear and Canon. Netgear because they offer no means to control band steering. Canon because they should not even be configuring their printers to work with 5GHz. But since Canon is allowing users to use 5GHz - they should offer the ability to toggle it on or off. I spent 2 hours with Canon Tech Support not solving my problem. It wasn't until I dug deeper on my own to discover that 5GHz is crap. Canon sent me a survey to measure the results of my satisfaction with their tech support. I happily responded and I have not heard back.
Netgear because they offer no means to control band steering.
There is not a single Netgear documentation explicitly or implicitly stating, that any Orbi systems are doing active band steering. A little bit different on the business grade Netgear wireless access points like the WAX6xx and WBE7xx models: There is an option to enable Band Steering if it's wanted by the network admin - by default it's disabled.
But since Canon is allowing users to use 5GHz - they should offer the ability to toggle it on or off.
Why oh why please? Not a single standard wireless client implementation does - on Windows or Apple systems, and not on most Linux systems - offers -any- kind of band selection. Just some cheap wirelss extenders might do ...
This was discussed up and down back at the times when some **** had the idea, that the configuration of certain IoT using brainded App implementations falsely requiring (and testing) if the mobile device with the App is currently connected to the 2.4 GHz band.
Industry standard wirless clients supporting 2.4 and 5 GHz, and much more those supporting all three bands 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz are depending on 802.11k and 802.11v, sometimes in combination with 802.11r (allowing fast roaming), even with WPA3-Personal (-AES) and WPA3- Enterprise, using SAE (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals) and IEEE 802.1X/EAP to temporary key snooping and replay impossible.
Even without any band steering - technically band steering to the better 5 or 6 GHz bands would for a short moment deny wifi access on the 2.4 GHz band, allowing the wireless client re-associating to the assumed better performing, more reliable 5 GHz band - any wireless client (unless it's sticky) will re-associate to the 5 GHz band extreme likely. This, and onls this, is what you wrongly claim to be band steering.
It wasn't until I dug deeper on my own to discover that 5GHz is crap.
5 GHz WiFi has - for physical reasons - a shorter reach than the 2,4 GHz band.
Sure, there can be some other systems disturbing 5 GHz systems, especially those located very near to your environment. For examle yet another WiFi router, also operating on the lower channels like 36...48, where the Orbi like the RBR50 and RBS50 are operating the client-facing connections.