A way to move devices to 5 GHz band!

[ekhalil]

By chance, I found a "magic button" to force some of my devices to move to the 5 GHz band. 🙂

My mesh speakers prefer almost always to connect to the 2.4 GHz band, specially the ones located far away from the router/satellite.

I was testing to switch on/off the guest network, I found out that when I click on the "Apply" button the router/satellite will reboot and when doing that it seems that the router and satellite will first bring up the 5 GHz band then wait a short time and then bring up the 2.4 GHz band.

By doing so and during the short time when the 2.4 GHz band was down, my devices had not choice but to move to the 5 GHz band.

I repeated this few times and the same sequence happened every time. This happens only when applying changes related to the guest wifi but didn't notice that the same happens when doing other changes or normal rebooting of the nodes.

[budy]

Well… actually, I don't think that this is a viable way of ensuring that a device will connect to either the 2.4GHz or 5GHz band reliably and - more importantly, stay on that band, as the band steering in the Orbi system will perform it's unpredictable actions.

Usually, the 2.4GHz has a better range and thus devices which are further away tend to be pushed to this band. So, I think, that the only way to circumvent the band-steering is to have separate SSIDs for each band.

That way, I was able to force my Ring Pro to the 2.4GHz band which caused the RSSI of 45 instead of 64 on the 5GHz band.

[TexasPharm]

How did you create separate SSIDs for 2.4 and 5 GHz bands? That is what I’ve been trying to figure out how to do but from everything I’ve read so far, Orbi does not allow you to do this. I am trying to find a way to do this for the same reason as you.

[ekhalil]

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@TexasPharm wrote:

How did you create separate SSIDs for 2.4 and 5 GHz bands? That is what I’ve been trying to figure out how to do but from everything I’ve read so far, Orbi does not allow you to do this. I am trying to find a way to do this for the same reason as you.

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Here is a post about separating the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands:

https://community.netgear.com/t5/Orbi/How-to-set-a-separate-SSID-for-the-5-GHz-network-on-your-Orbi/...