If you're in the market for a new wireless router, most of the models you'll find clearly
support both 2.4 and 5GHz Wi-Fi.
We talked about the difference between these two things in this video, but there's still
a burning question. Why are we still using the 2.4GHz band, which is much slower than the more modern 5GHz band?
To answer, we reached out to our friend Joel Crane, and we'd like to thank him for his
contributions. So at first glance, 2.4GHz seems inferior.
It has far less available spectrum than 5GHz, which means less bandwidth and more interference
from other devices. And the 5GHz band's minimum connection speed is 6Mbps compared to just 1Mbps for 2.4.
These minimum speeds are often deliberately used for management overhead, such as a smartphone
acknowledging to the router that it did in fact receive a data packet.
And devices that talk more slowly consume more time on the channel, further limiting
throughput. So, what's the deal? Well, first of all, there are still lots of client devices out there that only support
2.4GHz. Older devices, lower-end gadgets, and Internet of Things, or IoT products, are notorious
for this. And as with many things in life, cost is a big driver behind this, as we've been making
2.4GHz devices for a lot longer, and it's less complicated to stick a 2.4GHz radio inside
cheap electronics. By contrast, 5GHz radios nearly always have a 2.4GHz radio in them as well to ensure
backward compatibility, meaning that a 5GHz device is more complicated to manufacture.
So even if the cost is only a few cents more per unit, that can quickly add up to a lot
of money if a manufacturer is shipping millions of smart doorbells or whatever.
And on the subject of smart doorbells, there just isn't any reason for many IoT devices
to use the 5GHz band, as the smart light bulb in your bedroom, for example, doesn't require
an incredibly fast connection to receive the command to change from red to blue.
There's even a practical advantage to this by placing low bandwidth devices such as IoT
products on your home network's 2.4GHz band and everything else on your 5GHz band.
You can cut down on interference and increase throughput on your 4K streams and other more
data-hungry operations that way. However, some products that could actually benefit from 5GHz Wi-Fi actually still don't
have it. You see, it's common for manufacturers of products where connectivity isn't the main
focus to simply tell their designers, hey, we want Wi-Fi in this thing.
And the company will proceed to order the cheapest radios that you can find that will
simply work, which often means devices will end up with 2.4 only support because the manufacturer
doesn't know any better. You sometimes see this with products like gym equipment, where the brand is more concerned
about ensuring that the pedals on the elliptical don't collapse rather than about whether
the built-in screen can deliver a lag-free 1080p video playback.
But there's another important reason that doesn't have anything to do with manufacturers
being cheap and lazy. Range.
Although 5GHz Wi-Fi has many advantages, 2.4 still beats it in terms of range.
It can go farther and is better at dealing with pesky obstacles such as walls.
Again, this is important for IoT devices as well as industrial applications, meaning
that not only is 2.4GHz still popular for Wi-Fi, it's also still used for Bluetooth
and smart home protocols such as ZigBee. The last thing you want is for your smart coffee maker to forget to start brewing when
you wake up simply because it's too far from your router.
A real modern tragedy. So even though 2.4GHz Wi-Fi has become less common in certain situations, places like
stadiums and conventions are more frequently turning it off due to interference, its combination
of cost-effectiveness, range, and backwards compatibility means that it will still have
a home in our gadgets for quite some time.
My older doesn't always mean it's worse.
Just ask Finch from American Pie. Wow, I'm old. That's an old new reference.
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the comments with your suggestions for videos that we should cover in the future.