The reason they're doing it is that one way people test their internet is go to a download speed tester, and to prevent complaints and confusion, the ISP wants the fastest download possible.
The 2.4GHz band is incredibly noisy, and even a microwave running in an adjacent unit can tank your throughput. 5GHz doesn't penetrate walls as well as 2.4GHz, which means less noise in your house. So an excellent, easy way (for average consumers) to test WAN throughput is by using the 5GHz network with line of sight.
The intent and origination is not 5G confusion, but rather 5GHz's increased bandwidth due to a lower noise environment in the average user's house.
And actually, in a way "get faster speeds if they use the “5G” network exposed by their wifi router" is true: if you live in dense housing, between all of the devices spamming on 2.4 and the fact that walls "quiet" 5GHz reasonably effectively, using 5GHz can actually be a marked improvement for many users!
I guess it doesn't realllly matter for home users, sure does for businesses and high usage environments.
I'm just being frank though.
Do you mean the channel width? Quite possible, but whether that matters depends on whether your internet is faster than your wifi.
If you mean allocating portions of your internet bandwidth, that shouldn't happen should it? Any connection method should have access to all of it.
If you have say, gigabit internet, your capable bandwidth on 5ghz will be much, much faster, regardless if there's any 2.4ghz interference.
If anyone who isn't a radios expert cares... I prefer dongknows when reading about networks. A lot of people for some reason don't seem to like him, but he does a great job of both putting things simply, yet giving enough backing technical specs to not treat the reader like a child.
I'm pretty sure they get away with cramming more onto 5 largely because of the reduced noise.
Then someone comments about how the ISP is mixing and muddying the two, and some replies start going into all the technical details of how the Tesla is quick and why. Technically correct, but clueless because it’s the VW that is the problem.
If the statement were, 'hey, if you want faster internet, use 5Ghz', well then it would only sometimes be true and such analogies apply.
I can see where we're getting off track.
Person A) ISPs are telling people use 5Ghz to get faster internet.
Person B) 5Ghz is faster because 2.4Ghz is noisy.
Person C) Well, 5Ghz is faster regardless of noise.
Person D) Not if your internet is slow.
So, seems we're all answering something else. I'm expanding on B alone, and you on A-C, I think.
Then why write 5 GHz as “5G”, dropping the unit?
These are people who do not own a microwave or TV (they’re lucky to have a flush toilet) and their nearest neighbor is far enough away that the neighbor’s WiFi is undetectable, so the issues you mention do not apply. Yet they are told by an installer who does a physical visit to the place to put in a dish that choosing the 5GHz WiFi will make a difference. It won’t.
Of course you get higher speeds on 5ghz! How is this controversial?
Most people are still on 802.11ac which only works on 5ghz. It's also impossible to find a free channel on 2.4ghz unless you live in the woods so you'd be sharing airtime with the 10 other APs and all their clients on one of the 3 non-overlapping channels in the 2.4ghz band. On 5ghz you can easily run 80mhz channels instead of just barely getting a stable connection on 20mhz.
5GHz has a much lower effective range than 2.4GHz. Thus, there are areas where the 5GHz network will be available, but perform far worse than the 2.4GHz, even with congested 2.4GHz.
(Still worse, in some devices it can cause persistent problems until reboot. My last laptop, a Surface Book, had a Realtek chip, and I was using it near the edge of a router’s range for hours a day last year, and every few days it’d get into a broken state where packet loss was >20% and latency a few hundred milliseconds, even if I moved right next to the router. Connecting to different networks wouldn’t fix it; sleeping the laptop wouldn’t fix it; disabling and reenabling the thing in Device Manager would normally but not quite always fix it; rebooting would always fix it.)
Besides your hardware problems and signal power loss, devices don't cooperate to share spectrum and can't see all the nodes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_node_problem
There are cases where the client device stubbornly clings on to the 5Ghz network despite the signal being so terrible that no packets come through (more specifically, the packets from the access point to the device are still received, but the packets from the device to the access point are lost), but unless you've identified that you're in this case and can't mitigate it any other way you're still better off using a single SSID.
Think of your internet connection like the water coming into your home. Your 2.4Ghz connection is like the water dispenser on your refrigerator, and 5Ghz is like the hose bib on the outside of your house. If the water authority says the water pressure is enough to fill up a 5 gallon bucket in 1 minute, someone will call up complaining that it takes 20 minutes to fill up a 5 gallon bucket from the water dispenser on their refrigerator.
Your ISP telling you to use your 5Ghz Wifi to test, is like the water authority telling you to test with the hose bib on the outside of your house.
I think what confuses consumers more is byte vs bit, or more specifically, that the capitalisation of the ‘B’ matters.
It may be more human friendly, but 1024^n is more programmer friendly, especially at the low level.
Everyone was happy with 1024^n convention in the 80s. The problem was HDD manufacturers got greedy and switched to 1000^n to make their drives sound like they had more storage. Thats what started the confusion.
> a byte isn’t 10bits
It could be. Historically, the number of bits per byte varied somewhat from machine to machine. Many standards used the term 'octets' to avoid ambiguity.
The nature of bits is that of a base-2 system, so using power of 10s for counting them is only superficially human friendly - in practice it's human-unfriendly, because it flies in the face of how bits are used. All hardware and all software groups them by powers of 2, that's inherent to what bits are.
I much prefer to work with powers of 1000. Running "df" on our storage cluster shows
2675230000214900
2͟6752͟3͟0͟0002͟1͟4͟900
[1] https://blog.janestreet.com/commas-in-big-numbers-everywhere...
2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 sector sizes...
So even if your files are 200GB, the actual space they consume are not base 10 as you count on your storage cluster, but 200GB plus the last remaining sector that is used but unfilled as the rest of that sector cannot be used by another file.
You can count your sizes in Base 10 but the actual use of space is still Base 2.
If a file is exactly 1000 bits and your sector sizes are 1024... that 1000 bit file is using 1024 bits of space on that drive.
And no, just because they advertise or display drives as having 1,000,000 Bytes = 1MB... it doesn't change how space is sectored out on that drive itself.
Someone telling me a file is 200MB when they mean 200MiB (210MB) can make a difference, which is why we should strive for accuracy.
- hard drive and storage manufacturers
- measurements of network speeds (1Mbps is 1000000 bits per second)
- online storage providers (Dropbox's paid plan for 2TB is 2000GB for instance)
- macOS and iOS
- Ubuntu (see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnitsPolicy )
- most modern GNOME applications and most GUI applications on desktop Linux
- hard drive manufacturers have been sued over this, and US courts have agreed with hard drive manufacturers that 1 GB = 1000 MB
- the International System of Units (SI) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) both use the decimal definitions (1 kB = 1000 B)
The last major hold-outs are Microsoft Windows and old command-line applications that want to preserve backwards compatibility with any script that might parse their output.
Personally, I don't find the XiB units confusing, as they are the only units with a consistent unambiguous definition. The XB units are much more confusing because you can't be sure whether the 1000^n definition is intended or not.
And here lies the problem, before HDD manufacturers decided to change things up, computer science was already standardised on using 1024^n. Sure there was some outliers in network theory but it was pretty easy because if you needed a precise value then you knew it was 1024^n and if you just wanted an approximate value you could still divide by 1000 in your head. It worked, everyone understood it and everyone was happy.
This whole “1000^n is more human friendly” only appears so because we now have multiple interpretations and people without a tech background making decisions about it. But frankly, if you can’t wrap your head around 1024^n then you’re already in the group of users who honestly don’t need to worry about the precision of getting the scaling right. Those who it does matter for honestly find 1024^n easier.
And long before that, the SI units defined K as 10^3, G as 10^6 etc.. This is how the prefix is used everywhere for every unit, with the one exception of computer scientist playing it the US way.
I personally prefer 1024 as well, but honestly, the scientific side of that argument is a lost cause.