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[Chrysalis]

Both 2.4 and 5 are massively overcrowded with not enough channels, do you guys live in sparsely populated areas?

Right now for me.

Channel 1 8 visible AP's
Channel 6 11 visible AP's
Channel 11 6 Visible AP's - I am on here

5ghz seemingly only usable in its lowest channels due to firetv not supporting anything above channel 64.  I cant use channels 52-64 I get booted off and anything over 64 doesnt work on firetv.

I assume everyone else also gets booted off in my area as I see no AP's on 52-64 but 12 AP's on 36-48.

I have just tried the Xbox360 again, it now automatically detects my 2.4, however I had to rescan 6 times, it barely sees any 2.4 AP's at all, however it still cannot communicate, DHCP log is full of discover and responses been sent, setting manual static ip it just wont communicate.

My AP is OpenWRT based, so I suspect its probably this problem.

https://forum.openwrt.org/t/xbox-360-cant-get-a-valid-ip/77682

Xbox360 is of course very old and obsolete now, I only tried to get it online to upload my saves to the cloud, for use on my Xbox Series S.  So I will attach an ethernet cable.

But is a shame so many new devices restrict to very limited usable channels.  I think I might start using my second AP again just for firetv so I can get my laptop and phones back on the cleaner faster noise free higher 5ghz channels.

[Chrysalis]

Alternatively use the 5GHz radio in your device more, and have it steer devices to it automatically with band steering.

Others should do the same assuming they've that feature on their router, they probably do, to get as much as possible off 2.4. A few minutes perhaps to show them how if they need it.

If in a densely populated area your living space is probably a bit small. WiFi 6e is your friend.

Nothing on 2.4 besides the stuff that can't go elsewhere, likely minimal bandwidth IOT stuff. If it has 6e support use it. Everything else to 5GHz.

There shouldn't be anywhere with tons of devices people actually care about stuck on 2.4 GHz. By default many ISP routers have band steering of some sort activated out of the box and it may do this in a few ways. See attachment.

Very clever - uses the probe when clients see the SSID to assess whether they may be moved actively, if not doesn't respond to the probe or followups for 60 seconds on 2.4G, tries to encourage probing in 5G, and only then starts answering 2.4G probes.

If 802.11v is supported client is allowed to associate then is moved to 5G using 802.11v BSS Transition Management Requests.

Job done with this: should get most of the load onto 5GHz.

Looks interesting, usually I have different names for 2.4 vs 5 so dont need to steer and I only use 2.4 when the devices only have 2.4 support which seems to be the case on all smart devices and very old stuff like the xbox 360.

[Weaver]

I intentionally keep the SSID names the same for both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz in the hope, possibly vain hope, that my Apple stations will select the best channel. Currently ‘best’ will be 2.4 GHz because of the stronger signal strength combined with the fact that currently I have 2.4 GHz channel 1/6 set to 40 MHz wide, which is ok as I have no neighbours in range, so am not concerned about being greedy. I would love to know what will happen if my 2.4 GHz channel were only 20 MHz wide, the usual recommended best practice for friendliness. Would a station seeing both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz SSIDs at similar signal strengths go for the wider channel? I could of course simply try it, but designing a really good experimental setup is hard. I’m not concerned with WAPs’ steering mechanism kicking in because of a high number of stations on a channel; the channels are very lightly used.

[Chrysalis]

Well the Xbox360 is now functional online, I can give you an insight into the world of populated areas.

It managed to connect randomly after loads of retries, I did a speedtest and it got 200kbit/sec.  Timing out whilst downloading an OS update.

I then activated the 2.4 on the second switch I have quite close to it, and it now gets about 5mbit/second and goes online first time every time.  I dont expect speeds much higher then that given its 2.4 and the congestion though.

My experience tends to be the better wireless tech at equal signal strength works way faster.  So if signal steering is based on signal strength only it seems like it would need a weighting system applied in favour of the 5g like what XGS mentioned.

[XGS_Is_On]

Both 2.4 and 5 are massively overcrowded with not enough channels, do you guys live in sparsely populated areas?

Relatively. Modern suburban estate of detached and semi-detached properties. Not rural, not apartments or line of terraces, the bit in between. Probably on the more sparse end of the average though not a patch on Weaver.