Recently I took it upon myself to do a refresh of much of our wireless network at home here.
4 x OpenWRT devices
1 x Debian HostAPD device
I noticed that 2.4ghz really sucks compared to 5.8ghz, as long as you are within range.
The ping floor is about 15-20ms when connected to the 2.4ghz band.
The ping floor is about 5-8ms when connected to the 5.8ghz band.
Regardless of which AP I am connected to. I have a mix of qualcomm and mediatek devices... So I don't think its anything driver / vendor specific.
Also, with the 2.4ghz band I noticed a preiodic, cyclical ping spikes. Every 5 or so seconds the ping times would jump up to 30ms or so ms.
Also, on the 2.4ghz band, packet loss is much more frequent. A couple of my APs run in STA + WDS mode and I have a script that I run on them to log packet loss / slow ping responses. At 2.4ghz it will packet loss about 1-2 times per hour, and 5.8ghz 3-4 times per day. Yes, they are all nice and close signal / range wise.
I know we are talking about 10+ ms and a packet or two lost per hour... But 5.8ghz just seams so much more polished in my experience.
Is this normal?
BTW : I live in a fairly rf quiet environment... There ARE other access points around... But I am not in an apartment building with 60+ APs around me.
EDIT : Since we all love pictures... I have attached a couple of graphs to illustrate what I am talking about... Obviously the clean looking one is the 5.8ghz band. I was sitting about 4-5m away from the AP when these were taken.
Perhaps, if your devices are old as f-k, but we wouldn't know, since you haven't told us what they are.
1 x Mikrotik Hap AC2 (QCA4019)
1 x TP-Link RE650 (MT76)
1 x Xiaomi AC2350 (QCA95xx + QCA98xx)
1 x PC Engines APU2D4 w/2 MikroTIK minipcie adapters (QCA95xx + QCA98xx)
2 x TP-Link WR902AC in dummy bridge mode
1 x Debian device w/ 2 x MikroTIK minipcie adapters... QCA9880 on the 5.8 and umm one of the later QCA95xx on the 2.4 (Edit : for what its worth the chassis / mobo is a Hystou H5 "industrial" mini PC)
Edit : Both the debian device and the APU2 (each) have the following:
In theory, ping shouldn't vary that much between 2.4- and 5 GHz (but still a little, faster base rates), in practice... 2.4 GHz is much more affected by interference than 5 GHz, be it microwave ovens, bluetooth, wireless headphones, babyfons (including video based ones) or A/V transceivers, older (non-wlan) surveillance cameras and not to forget the overlapping WLANs of your neighbours.
To put this into perspective, you'd also have to consider your living environment:
if you'd live in the sticks and can barely see the next house
only in this case you can control interference and switch off all other devices which might interfere for a test, here ping shouldn't differ that much
if you're living in a neighbourhood with detached homes, solid brick walls, 6m between houses, you will easily see 10-20 neighbouring BSSIDs (keep in mind that one BSSID still causes interference 3-4 times further, than you can scan/ see its ESSID) and all the other causes for interference.
this will obviously already affect your 2.4 GHz throughput, but will nevertheless keep it usable (to varying degrees thereof)
multi-flat houses and apartment complexes (and its immediate surrounding), 30+ BSSIDs totally flatline the ether.
here you will see a real difference with 5 GHz and 6 GHz might already be a real advantage (think high-rise buildings)
With four APs on your premises, you're already creating quite some interference yourself (only 3 non-overlapping 20 MHz channels on 2.4 GHz), combined with one of the later two neighbourhoods, the 2.4 GHz might quickly bevome non-viable. Keep in mind that 2.4 GHz radios are easier to build, meaning a lot of cheap non-wifi crap is also using these frequencies - and range/ better wall penetration increases the interference as well.
i have quite a number of iot devices broadcasting via bluetooth. ill see about lowering the broadcast rate and see if it improves the overall scenario.
