STOP USING 2.4 GHz WiFi ❗

all right now I know the title might seem a bit sensationalist but the truth is when it comes to Wi-Fi you should almost always use the five gigahertz spectrum when you can if you have that option now well hold on because I know some of you know it alls right now we're about to click off the video you think you know everything you're like yeah obviously five gigahertz is better we already know it's faster we already know it has less interference but it's the same type of you lot who go around still using 2.4 gigahertz sometimes because you think oh well it's like it has a little bit better range 5 gigahertz isn't that much better it doesn't really matter does it but I'm willing to bet that you don't know nearly as much about the difference between 2.4 and 5 gigahertz as you may think and after this video you're probably never gonna want to use 2.4 gigahertz again if you have any choice in it now I should start off by saying that there's nothing inherently wrong with 2.4 gigahertz it's not like it's got less security or anything like that so if you only have access to 2.4 gigahertz or only connecting to that then don't worry about it it's just that 5 gigahertz is so much better than the 2.4 spectrum and that once you know the difference is at the end of this video the whole point is you'll realize how much better it is so we can kind of get started by saying that there's gonna be three main differences that we can talk about between 2.4 and 5 gigahertz and those are going to be the speed and bandwidth the interference and the range now you may already know that the one advantage of the 2.4 gigahertz spectrum is increased range because lower frequency radio waves can travel through more things but more often times than not usually the advantages of 5 gigahertz will outweigh that one advantage of the 2.4 so then moving on what about speed well the first thing to understand is that if you have an AC Wi-Fi device and an AC Wi-Fi capable router the only way you can get the AC technology standard is to use five gigahertz five gigahertz is the only thing that AC uses otherwise if you're using 2.4 it's gonna be N or less so if you're using an AC device that's already a twofold if you were to switch to 2.4 gigahertz because you're losing the AC standard and you're losing the other advantages of 5 gigahertz and we can talk about what AC is in a bit but the other thing to know is if you're using n8o 2.11 n then you can use both 2.4 and 5 gigahertz and it obviously is still better to use 5 gigahertz we'll get into that but it's still not going to be as good as you would get on AC 5 gigahertz but that just makes sense AC is the newer version also when it comes to n typically you're gonna have the same maximum speed capability whether you're on 2 point 4 or 5 gigahertz so 802 dot 11 and on 5 gigahertz might not be any faster than it is on 2.4 but there are other advantages that we're gonna get into or it still is way more worth of ds5 so up until now we've really haven't talked about any numbers so let's get into some actual figures to understand how much better it is so when it comes to speeds ignoring interference itself these maximum theoretical speeds for 802 dot 11 n it's gonna be about 450 megabits per second max on both 2.4 and 5 gigahertz when it comes to a 2 2.11 AC which is only 5 gigahertz you're gonna get a max of 866 megabits per second nearly double the bandwidth and speed and if a router has mu-mimo technology which stands for a multi-user multi-input multi-output you're gonna have a maximum of 1.7 gigabits per second so depending on the router you could have as much as a 4 times difference between the maximum bandwidth if you were to use AC on 5 gigahertz or just 2.4 with n now I know that there are ton of you smart asses out there saying yeah well you know what I don't even have that fast internet so who cares about the maximum speed well think about this that's the maximum theoretical bandwidth in ideal perfect conditions that's like if your phone is literally sitting right next to the router with zero interference from other routers around and no other devices connected to the router that's not going to ever happen but if you're in a real life situation where your the house and you're in an apartment complex or your neighbors interfering then yeah you're not gonna ever get that maximum speed so the higher the maximum even if it's reduced by say 75% you're still going to get a much much higher speed if the it tops out much higher because you're gonna get a lower percentage of still a bigger number and also keep in mind that total bandwidth has to be shared across all the devices connected so if you're on five gigahertz you could potentially have up to four times as many devices connected with the same amount of bandwidth and if it doesn't have mu-mimo for a multi-user multi-input multi-output then the router has to talk to each device individually as to stop broadcasting to one start broadcasting another and switch between all these whereas if it has mu-mimo it can talk to multiple at once now obviously the switch happens very fast but you can see how you're gonna get a lot higher throughput if you can talk to multiple things at once and you can only get that on AC with five gigahertz now the topic of speed differences gets kind of complicated here because we're talking about different protocols obviously the newer AC Wi-Fi is gonna be better than the n Wi-Fi even if you're on the same frequency so yes it does make a huge difference already just from the fact that if you're switching from five gigahertz to 2.4 gigahertz then you lose all of the advantages of AC but even if you're only using a to 2,000 n it's still advantageous to connect to 5 gigahertz over 2.4 if it's supports dual-band so the reason for that is have you ever thought about why the 2.4 gigahertz name it's very specific 2.4 whereas 5 gigahertz it's just 5 and it seems very specific and we can get into why that is you see the 2.4 gigahertz spectrum has that name because it is only 100 megahertz wide it's from 2.4 up to 2.5 not including it and that whole spectrum has 11 possible channels that you can choose from each of them being 20 megahertz wide though you might be thinking wait a minute if each one is 20 megahertz and the total is a hundred megahertz how can there be 11 of them and that is because the 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi spectrum only has a whopping three channels that are non-overlapping that means if you had two other friends and all three of you wanted a router that would be the maximum amount of people who could choose their own channel with zero interference if another friend came along with their own router or you had a fourth neighbor then someone would get interference there's no way around it with just four devices so you can imagine with effectively four spots available there's not a lot of room if you're going to be living in an apartment complex or in a city or something then that three channels or three segments of 60 is gonna get filled up very quickly you're gonna have a lot of routers on the same spectrum but what about five gigahertz well it gets much better here because that spans the entire thousand megahertz 10 times as much frequency range as you get with 2.4 so unlike 2.4 which has three non-overlapping channels 5 gigahertz has 34 non-overlapping channels that means you could have 33 other friends with you and everyone could have their own router with zero interference with each other and that's what the 20 megahertz channels you can actually combine with AC into 40 megahertz channels or even 80 megahertz channels which have 12 and six non-overlapping channels respectively so even the largest bandwidth 80 megahertz channels has more double specifically as all you can get with 2.4 megahertz although most devices do only use 20 or 40 so you're still gonna get so much less interference if any if you're using 5 gigahertz so you can easily probably guess how much interference your routers are getting if you just look at a list of Wi-Fi devices that are within range of you if you're an apartment complex look at all the 2.4 gigahertz devices and count them up and divide by 3 and that is how many devices are probably interfering with you right now it's probably a big number whereas if you go on the 5u Hertz from you / 34 and that's the probable number of how many devices are interfering with you if it's any at all so in a vast majority of cases no matter where you live if you use 5 gigahertz you're probably going to have a channel entirely to yourself on your router you have one of a 34 but that's not the only advantage it's not just routers a lot of other stuff you use the 2.4 gigahertz spectrum as well because it's a public allocated spectrum that devices are allowed to use one notable one is microwaves for cooking food they use the same 2.4 gigahertz spectrum now they're obviously a lot more powerful so much so that they can cook food however they are very well insulated so almost none of the microwave radiation escapes but it's such a small amount that's still enough to interfere with Wi-Fi and loads of other stuff uses 2.4 some examples are cordless phones if you still have some of them around Bluetooth devices car alarm sensors and even video camera wireless feeds stuff like that lots of stuff so if you're using 2.4 gigahertz you're basically having to share those three non-overlapping channels with everyone else's routers and any other device that happens to be broadcasting on those frequencies whereas if you're using 5 gigahertz then it's very unlikely for all 34 of those spots to be filled up especially since even if you're in a very densely packed apartment complex the signal from some of your neighbors is going to fall off before it reaches you so even if everyone around you in every direction was using 5 gigahertz the people maybe five spots away from you wouldn't even reach you so you're not going to fill up those 34 spots with people that are within range for it to make a difference and with routers these days most of them do have an auto channel selection function so if someone hops onto your channel and five gigahertz shouldn't take long before it swaps to another but if you're on 2.4 gigahertz then you don't really have that many options anyway and also you can actually use apps like for Android there's one called Wi-Fi analyzer and it will show you a map of all the devices you using Wi-Fi a map of the spectrum that is so you can see what kind of devices are overlaying what the channel are you using right now if you look at the five you heard spectrum you can see that you have to scroll over it's so big there's almost no overlap at all but what about range we did kind of talk about that before I should really touch on it and yes we talked about how 2.4 gigahertz is better and 5 gigahertz is blocked by more stuff whether that's furniture or walls or even air and it is kind of a blessing and a curse because it also means that people from further away won't be able to interfere as much with your signal but it also means that you might not get any signal if you're too far away from your own router so yeah you should use 5 gigahertz whenever you can but if you have absolutely zero signal and 2.4 gigahertz is your only option well yeah a little signal is better than none at all but if you do have both options you may notice that the 5 gigahertz signal is a little bit less but I would still suggest connect to both and try them because you may find that even though the 5 gigahertz signal is weaker it still might be significantly faster than 2.4 because of all the other advantages that go along with it so hopefully now I've converted you if you tended to use 2.4 gigahertz a little bit too much you'll now start using 5 gigahertz at every opportunity you can and if you have a lot of device in your home that you don't really know which one they're connected to try switching as many over as you can to 5 gigahertz so that way they won't have to share as many devices on the same channel and that way if you do have some devices that require you to use 2.4 gigahertz then they'll have a little bit more breathing room because the devices that can use 5 gigahertz will be off that channel so hopefully you guys enjoyed this video if you did let me know you think down the comments and give this video a thumbs up and all that good stuff if you want to keep watching I'll put some other videos right here you can just click on those and if you want to subscribe I make a couple new videos a week so it should be worth it so thanks again for watching guys I'll see you next time have a good one

Channel: ThioJoe

Views: 237,120

Keywords: technology, tech, 2.4 ghz, 5 ghz, wifi, 2.4 ghz wifi, 5 ghz wifi, 2.4 ghz vs 5 ghz, 2.4ghz, 5ghz, 2.4ghz vs 5ghz, best wifi, 802.11ac, 2.4ghz vs 5ghz wifi, dual band router, 802.11, wifi router, 5ghz wifi, wireless lan, router, dual band wifi, wireless router, wireless, 802.11n, dual band, wifi range, wifi speed

Id: 9jIx6qqlSfo

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 28 2018