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Scary warning: 40 Mhz and 20 Mhz coexistence?
So I use my Mac's Wireless Diagnostics WiFi scanner tool to find the best 2.4G and 5G wifi channles to use, then enter my two selected channels into the Wireless Settings page of the Netgear Orbi web...
hi , the 2.4 gig wifi world is saturated with users and so as to ensure that this doesnt continue to happen the wifi alliance set a rule that forces the 2.4 gig down to 20mhz in areas where the 2.4 gig is congested and to avoid further congestion , its also called neighbor friendly wifi
so if you disable this setting and force it to run at 40mhz you are just being rude to your neighbors and pretty much giving them the bird
so you can be nice and leave it enabled and everyone will get a bit of bandwidth without too much congestion or you can be a prick and disable it and say screw you to your neighbors
thats your choice
your older 2.4 gig devices will work regardless of if its running at 20mhz or 40mhz
here is a link to help you understand why its there and what it does
http://www.nxp.com/docs/en/application-note/AN5185.pdf
the simple answer is to move or buy new devices that have 5 gig , and just leave things that dont have any demand on 2.4 gig , eg i have my wemo light switches on 2.4 gig as thats all they have and they dont use a lot of bandwidth at all , same with my wifi printer , everything else here has been ether updated to 5 gig or replaced with 5 gig devices
Ideally, yes. And most of my important wifi devices do run at 5G (or are at least capable of it). However, since I have kids, they still have devices such as Nintendo DS that know nothing about 5G speeds, etc. So I need to leave it enabled for the odd times they want to fire those devices up.
Here's a good question:
Why doesn't the Netgear console report what SPEED each of the connected devices are using?
Clearly, the router knows this information, since it negotiated the connection for each wifi device. This would be a fantastic bit of troubleshooting information, yet its not available in either the basic or advanced Devices sections of the admin console. And since Orbi uses a single SSID (which is great) it also obscurs what speed each of the devices are using. Previously, we knew the connected speed for each device implicitly by its associated SSID, which was always associated with a specific frequency. That's all changed/hidden now. But if I could confirm that ALL my current wifi devices were operating at 5G speeds, I might feel more comfortable disabling the 2.4G speed completely until and if it is actually needed. But at this point, I have no idea if my Orbi is spreading all my devices across both its 2.4G and 5G radios to maximize parallel throughput or not. It's a black box right now.
It actually does ... go to administration > attached devices ...