The home network name remains identical across both 2.4GHz and 5GHz connections.
The home network name remains identical across both 2.4GHz and 5GHz connections.
Evening folks. While I get my landlord to bring the AT&T guy over here and fix this awful mess of an internet situation, I was picking around in the IP address settings thing and found that the 2.4GHz network on my all-in-one "Genie" PoS router thing appears to have a more stable, if not slower, connection. I'm getting massive packet loss in my video games and the rest of my internet, so I wanted to see if I could connect to this specific network. I know nothing about networking other than putting in a password. The SSID's are the same name, but I can *see* everything else in the router's settings, like mac addresses, the IPv4 address.. other stuff? I know the passwords to 'both' of these networks so no worries about my trying to 'hack' into this router. I just want to use the 2.4GHz line. Can't seem Google a page that speaks to me in plain idiot english.. so I turn to you. Please help! I mean, can you even help? Is this just out of my hands until the internet person gets here?
Idiomatic explanation with a light tone:
It often comes down to the Wi-Fi adapter drivers you have installed. Some devices let you turn off certain networks like 5GHz or 2.4GHz. You can find more details in this article about setting up Surface Pro 3: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-manua...face-pro-3. If you don’t see these options, maybe just switch off the 5GHz network on your router.
From a technical standpoint, the fact that SSIDs share the same name doesn't pose a problem beyond minor confusion about which network you're connected to. Most modern routers handle 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz networks together in linked mode, effectively creating a single unified network. The router will automatically select the bandwidth your device supports. If it switches to 5 GHz but disconnects unexpectedly, it should revert to 2.4 GHz at least as a fallback. You can disable linked mode and customize SSIDs and passwords directly on the router's WiFi settings page. To achieve different SSIDs and/or passwords, you'll need to turn off linked mode first.
During the handshake, the router will prompt the device to list its supported protocols and will firmly decline a link with an incompatible device. It won’t turn off the entire radio just because another device claims it doesn’t support it. This means that if any device tries to connect over 5GHz, all others would lose connection since one non-5GHz attempt would block the whole network. The 2.4 and 5GHz bands operate independently—one doesn’t interfere with the other.
Ensure the device connects solely via 2.4GHz during the handshake, and the router switches to that frequency. Check for the linked mode setting; the option to adjust individual radios is only visible when linked mode is turned off.