I recently ordered a Blu-ray player that has dual band Wifi. Besides 2.4 Ghz, it supports 5 Ghz Wifi. It claims it is faster and has less interference than 2.4 Ghz. OK, this all sounds fine and good, but what good is this if not all your devices support 5 Ghz Wifi? Also, is there a name, as in assigned by IEEE or something industry generic for the 5 Ghz Wifi so I can look at the specs of devices to see if it is supported?
Does 5 Ghz WiFi support WPA2?
Can you run 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz from the same wireless router with the same SSID? And does this all work as hoped or does it slow everything down to the 2.4 Ghz speed even in the 5 Ghz?
IEEE 802.11ac is the 5GHz wifi. It does support WPA2. I think most routers let you use the same SSID. I like to use different SSIDs so I can manually choose which one to connect to.
My experience is, 5GHz is great if I’m near the router, at most 1 wall in between. Further than that, 2.4GHz is more reliable, because 5GHz is less penetrating than 2.4GHz. The 5Ghz band has “less interference” only in the sense that it’s less crowded, and therefore less likely to conflict with other routers nearby. It does make a difference in buildings with multiple WiFi routers (apartments, hotels that only provide wired internet and therefore many guests are using wifi hotspots, etc).
Thanks! Now that I know to look for 802.11ac, I can see that few devices support this currently. There are adapters to support this, but I’d need to have a special use that the 20 Mbps I get from WiFI in the 2.4 Ghz isn’t providing, so I can’t see it worth doing. Eventually the new products will have it, but for now I can’t see upgrading to it just for the blu-ray player.
Isn’t something else using 5 Ghz already? Like cordless phones that have DECT? If so, that might cause interference.
I think with 802.11ac’s speed, it really makes the idea of running ethernet Cat5 (Cat6?) not as necessary.
Most smartphones can use the 5GHz band, and by splitting your devices between the bands you can get better throughput. There are several tutorials that can help you set it all up. I like the ones from dd-wrt but usually there are model specific ones on places like youtube or the mfr’s website.