Wifi banding

Our WiFi router broadcasts on two bands: Band 1 (2.4Ghz) and Band 2 (5Ghz). The trouble is the router broadcasts across both bands with the same SSID. I was blissfully unaware of the latter fact until yesterday, when I was setting up a smart plug for the Christmas tree lights. The smart plug (I bought a bunch of them a couple of years ago) only operates on Band 1. And it needed to connect through my phone to authenticate to the WiFi. And my phone was connected to the WiFi on Band 2, which the smart plug can’t access. So, short story long, the smart plug can’t authenticate to (and therefore can’t access) the WiFi which makes the smart plug a not very smart plug.

I looked at a couple of dozen Android help pages as I tried to figure out how to make my phone see (and therefore operate on) Band 1. All of the help pages were stunningly unhelpful, so I had to figure out a different method of cracking that nut. So…

I accessed the router control panel and tried to figure out a different way of solving the problem to make the smart plug do its stuff. I needed to force my phone to pick up Band 1 and nothing leapt out at me. Except. I had an idea. What if I changed the SSID for one of the Bands? Differentiated between the Bands with a name change?

I looked at how many devices connected to each frequency. Band 2 had many more devices attached than Band 1 (who knew we had that many devices in the house that attached to WiFi?), so Band 1 was the candidate for a SSID change. I added the suffix ‘band1’ to the 2.4Ghz SSID and left the Band 2 SSID alone (because I had figured out that changing the SSID for either of the bands would disconnect all the devices attached to it, and they’d need to be manually reconnected. The only devices connected to Band 1 were two internal cameras, and the washing machine (cunningly named ‘Washy McWashFace’).

Anyway, I connected my phone to the new Band 1 SSID, and finished setting up the new smart plug. Then I connected the cameras to the new Band 1 SSID. While I was doing that, the good lady wife her indoors attached Washy McWashFace to the new SSID. And there it was, all done. Not only do we have an additional SSID in the house (which only a few devices are attached to), but we can now say ‘Alexa, turn the tree on.’

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4 Responses to Wifi banding

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  2. Masher says:

    I have done similar: my SSIDs read ‘mash_2g’ and ‘mash_5g’

  3. Allister says:

    “Smart” devices that only work on 2.4 GHz are a real problem. I hadn’t considered the dual SSID approach but was able to reduce the power of the 5 GHz radio to 25% and then perform device setup at the other end of the house on one occasion.

    However, just this evening, I read the instructions for a new device and they loudly exclaimed my phone MUST connect to 2.4 GHz. I decided to ignore this and on starting the setup process I was rewarded with a prompt to allow Bluetooth. And it was all done and working within a minute or so.

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