Is 2.4ghz better than 5ghz in this situation?

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Miasr1

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May 28, 2014
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I have a dual band Wireless Card in my desktop and a dual band router about two rooms over. I get full bars on the 2.4ghz band but only 144.4mbps. On the 5ghz I get about 3 bars but 300mbps. Which is a better option? Does signal strength matter in terms of speed? I never drop connection.
Ideally, I would be on ethernet but that is not an option right now.
 
Solution
Tradesman1
Looks like in your case the 5 is better, generally with walls and whatnot the 2.4 is better overall, but here there doesn't appear to be enough "interference" to denigrate the 5
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kenghtt

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Oct 23, 2013
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5gh is always the better choice. You get a better and clearer connection. Even if I get 2-3 bars on 5ghz and have 4-5 bars 2.4ghz, the 5ghz connection is still better. If your outside or far from your router, you might only get 1 bar from 5ghz, then in this case switch to 2.4 :)
 
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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Signal strength only partially determines speed. If you have nobody else near you and you have few other electronic wireless things in your house then you can use signal strength to select the best connection.

What is much more important is wireless quality. Some wireless nics will display the number of errors your are getting. You could have a very strong signal with lot of neighbors also transmitting on that channel and you will get worse performance than a channel with lower signal strength but no interference.

It would be really nice if there was some way to predict this but every house is different and all you can do is test and see what is best for you. In general 2.4g is much more crowded. 5g has more channels but 802.11ac is doing a good job of making that not matter....the new standard out later this use uses 8 of 9 the common 5g channels. Still because 5g does not penetrate walls as well it also does a better job of blocking your neighbors signals from getting into your house.

Still all this tech stuff does not matter. You pretty much just have to try a bunch of settings and see which works best in your environment.


....a added note the reason your router is running 144 on 2.4g is it likely detected a neighbor running on 2.4g and degraded itself to 20mhz channels rather than use 40mhz. You can force it to use 40mhz in some routers if your like but it may actually run worse because of more interference.
 
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kenghtt

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Oct 23, 2013
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Yes thats true, but he's only 2 rooms away. 5ghz should be just fine.
 
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