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I run both. 5Ghz for high bandwidth devices such as phones and laptops. 2.4Ghz for IoT stuff that needs to penetrate through walls and isn't using much bandwidth.
Because of this useful niche, it probably won't go away for a long time. Just like new burglar/fire alarm panels, UPSs, and network appliances that still use RS232 serial interfaces to program some settings.
Edit: I am actually really surprised at how unpopular this opinion appears to be.
2.4Ghz WiFi works perfectly for me, possibly because I'm not using an "OEM" access point - but rather went out and spent a couple hundred dollars on a good one myself. Both at home in the suburbs and at our office in the city with several businesses in one building, 2.4Ghz works great.
In my experience 5Ghz only has acceptable performance if you have an access point in every internal room. I have zero interest in setting that up and like the fact that I can have reliable internet on my entire suburban block with a single (good) access point.
"Upgrading" to 5Ghz would mean replacing one access point with eight access points. No thanks.
As for wanting 400mbps... wtf for? I have a 10Gbps connection (wired) at the office and 50Mbps (wifi, 2.4Ghz) at home. Honestly can't tell the difference. Sure, large downloads are faster... but that's not something I do often especially at home. And if I did want that, I wouldn't be using wireless. Latency is far more important than bandwidth and wired has better latency.
You sound like a USA citizen. There many places in the world where walls are made of concrete. 5Ghz doesn't penetration concrete.
In such cases, the only way to get 5GHz into every room will be passing cat5 cable in the wall and placing an AP.
Passing a cable in concrete walls requires a pipe in the wall, that was placed there when the house was built! But in many cases, the tunnels that exists are too narrow for cat5 and are already in use anyway.
So to fulfill your idea and still have WiFi we will need to raze to the ground whole cities and rebuild them.
Unless you are footing the bill, and take care of the CO2 emissions, just learn to disable 2.4GHz on your router.
CAT5 is essentially dead. Highly recommended to use cat6/e as a minimum, or cat8. The world is beginning to switch to multi gig ethernet and CAT5 is simply insufficient for that.
Yes it will work at gigabit speeds and most things you do will not require more than gigabit but who knows what we will be running in 10 years and cat 6 can handle 10 gig over a pretty good distance which should be sufficient until it needs to be completely replaced.
That being said, unless you are currently running a multi gig ethernet setup and are running into bandwidth limitations on CAT5 or cat5e, there is no need to pull and replace what is already there. This advice is for new deployments.
I agree with the sentiment, but I think cat5 is enough for at home deployment. My edge device isn't using 1Gb now, and it won't use 10 in ten years. Mostly because it may be cheaper to replace when needed than to deploy for future proofing.
For offices and such I agree, as the disruption of work for a few days may cost more than future proofing the net.
It is always amazing how many people think their own specific situation should be used as the defining standard for the rest of the world.
5 ghz just doesn't get through stucco, concrete or even an inconveniently located furnace very well, nor does it reach nearly as far as a 2.4 ghz signal when only drywall and wooden studs are in the way. It would take 5 AP's at 5ghz to cover the same area as 2 at 2.4 ghz in my environment.
The great thing is that you can disable 2.4 ghz wifi on all your devices and the rest of us can continue to do what works for us.
Here's the thing. There are still plenty of devices that only have 2.4Ghz radios. There's some cheaper stuff still made today with just 2.4Ghz. So you'd just cut out a load of devices from working straight out. This kind of thing needs to be done slowly. 3G was very different because phone makers generally always want the more modern technology and phones that didn't have radios capable of 4g or better really are just rare now.
But, there's also just no reason to. Have 2.4Ghz available doesn't hurt you, if you're not using it. Any chipset with 5Ghz is not costing more to also support 2.4. They're just all pretty much single chip solutions these days and the aerial is usually just a coil on the board somewhere. If your device works on 5Ghz it will use 5Ghz.
I'd also argue in real terms 5Ghz isn't much better than 2.4Ghz in terms of channel space in places that need to respect DFS rules you generally only get one 80Mhz channel that will definitely work, and if you're using 802.11ax 80Mhz is really the minimum you want to get even remotely close to the advertised rate. Everything else useful is either DFS or limited power (at least here in the UK, and I don't recall seeing the limited power channel as an option). Now, I've generally setup two wifi APs in my house, one on the only non DFS channel, and the other on a DFS channel. That way if the DFS channel gets knocked out there's a fallback to the already congested "main" 5Ghz channel.
I think the main point is, why remove something that doesn't really affect you but may well affect others?
Sounds dumb as hell.
Even defaulting to 5GHz for any device that says it supports it causes all kinds of stability issues. I have to manually disable it for devices all the time.
For residential space sure. For campus deployments, 2.4 is really helpful to get coverage in places you couldn't justify additional antennas, or to blanket outdoor spaces between buildings. When you manage 10s of thousands of WAPs, in all sorts of crazy buildings and locations, you need every tool you can get.
I get this opinion quite well.
The problem I've observed are devices that foolishly switch to 2.4ghz in a crowded space, such as the Nintendo switch. There really needs to be an extra check for devices sensitive to latency to never connect to a 2.4ghz network on a crowded channel unless it's the only option.
