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Megahertz Madness
I was recently exploring my router’s settings—more through curiosity than any particular need. While there, I found an option to adjust channel widths. It was preset to 20/40/80MHz, but there was a tick box to enable 160MHz. What does this mean and what’s the difference between them? Bigger usually means better, so should I enable the 160MHz option?
—James McCarthy
THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: It can, but this is a complex area where sometimes less is more. By necessity, we’re going to have to simplify matters. Though not a perfect analogy, think of Wi-Fi bands such as 2.4GHz and 5GHz as freeways. In this context, the channels are lanes. Each lane can carry only so much data—or vehicles, to stretch our analogy. A standard channel on either band has a lane ‘width’ of 20MHz, enough for narrow vehicles only.
Here, our analogy breaks down a little, but to send more data, more efficiently, wider vehicles are needed and that means wider
