I realized I am years out of date but bought an RAXE300 to replace an R9000

I realized I am years out of date but bought an RAXE300 to replace an R9000.  Posting here because this conversation seemed relevant.

 

I probably should have gotten a 7E device but really, it's just my wife and I and though we have several devices, we tend to use them at different times.  Our Spectrum 600 is plenty for us even streaming different things.  I was surprised that my refurbished 300 was already registered as of last summer so I don't get a warranty but I can return to Amazon if it goes down in 3 mos, so lack of warranty probably is unimportant.

 

We have 2 Macs and a Macbook that support 6GHz; the iPhones, iPads, HomePods and AppleTV support 5GHz.  I had to keep the old router name for compatibility with 2.4 stuff including a Chamberlain Homebridge that is a nightmare to set up.  (As soon as it breaks, I'll get something else).  We have lots of Smart Devices but they mostly connect by bluetooth to the homepods.

 

So I named everything Netgear, Netgear-5G and Netgear-6G and kept my old WiFi password.  (I thought the appended Gs were required but have learned better).  I switched to WPA3.  Macs connected fine to 6G but displayed incompatibility warnings, which I am not sure mean anything.  I had to reconnect the 5G devices and through the phones update the homepods.  Everything worked but bothered me about the warning on the Macs.

 

Then after reading a lot, I renamed everything to Netgear.  2.4 stuff, no problem.  I could get Macs to Connect to 6GHz although it was hard to tell.  If it said it was WPA-3, I knew it was right, but all of 5G stuff just connected to 2.4 and no way to get it to connect anywhere else.  If I tried to force WPA-3, it would say it was the wrong protocol.

 

So I renamed the 5G to Netgear-5G.  All the 5G stuff reconnected immediately and the 6G stuff (3 Macs automatically go with the 6G eschewing the 2.4 even though it's the same named SSID.  Great.  And the warning is gone on the Macs.  It seems happy that the SSID for 6G is the same as 2.4.

 

Everything is fine.  I turned on AX for both 5G and 6G but not for 2.4.  That works fine too.

 

So is this supposed to work this way?  It does work so I am going with it.

 

My only question is why in the heck did the 5G stuff not connect at 5G when I had the same SSID for everything?