It was one of those conversations that started going down the rabbit hole remarkably quickly. While propping up the bar with a pint, my friend was asking me why his new Wi-Fi installation wasn’t any faster than the previous one.
I probably should have downed my pint and run, but he’s a good mate and it would have been rude. After all, he was in the process of buying me another beer.
What, I asked, had happened? He had decided that he wasn’t happy with the speed of his ISP-supplied router, which had built in Wi-Fi, and so had gone and bought a shiny new Wi-Fi unit. It’s a mesh design from a well-known vendor, but he had bought one unit to get started with. He could always add more if the radio signal reach wasn’t enough. The ISP-supplied router had done pretty good service across his semi-detached house, so it was unlikely that more mesh units would be needed.
He’s not technically illiterate and had managed to set up everything, including disabling the Wi-Fi in the ISP router. But he was still insistent that things were no better.
And this clearly wasn’t right, because the new Wi-Fi unit was claiming “up to 10.8Gbits/sec Wi-Fi speeds”. Deciding that yet more beer was required, I borrowed a pad of A4 paper and pen from the bar, and we sat down to go through the fundamentals.
First, let’s deal with frequency bands. There are two in common use, with the third coming on stream now. There’s a band of space in the 2.4GHz range, and another in the 5GHz range. Finally, there’s the
