Whether you might be welcoming a new robot vacuum into your private home, establishing smart lighting, or including one of many newest smart speakers, there’s an opportunity you might run into bother getting your smart home devices connected to your Wi-Fi community. There are a couple of potential causes, however the commonest is that many sensible house units can solely hook up with the two.4-GHz Wi-Fi band.

Simply put, most routers have a single community identify or SSID (Service Set Identifier), which is what your units hook up with. The router decides on the frequency band—selecting between 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz—primarily based on the system and sign energy, which is known as band steering. The 2.4-GHz band has higher vary and penetration via obstacles like partitions, however the 5-GHz band is quicker.

The downside? If you utilize your cellphone to arrange the sensible house system by way of its respective app, you would possibly discover that the system desires to hitch the two.4-GHz Wi-Fi band, however your cellphone is on the 5-GHz band. This disconnect can result in a irritating loop the place your new system hangs on the connecting step earlier than finally reporting that it can’t be part of your community. Thankfully, there are three most important methods to resolve this concern.

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Split the Bands

Many routers and mesh systems assist you to arrange separate SSIDs for two.4-GHz and 5-GHz networks by way of an app or net interface—you may must seek the advice of the settings menu to determine how. 

By splitting the bands, your 2.4-GHz community and your 5-GHz community can have distinct names and passwords. This makes your private home community barely extra complicated, but it surely does assist you to determine which band to hitch. For units that function on 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz, like your cellphone and laptop computer, you may wish to be part of each and let your system select (it ought to default to the quickest out there sturdy sign). It’s a good suggestion to append the identify of the 5-GHz band, so you understand which is which. (For instance, identify them “mynetwork” and “mynetwork_5GHz.”) 

Smart house units which have this connectivity downside throughout setup can join simply effective after you full the cut up, so you possibly can change again to a single SSID after your new system is efficiently related (simply be sure the two.4-GHz band community has the identify and password you plan to make use of as your most important community).

Go the Distance

A less complicated methodology is to maneuver far sufficient away out of your router (be sure to unplug the closest mesh node); this would possibly drive your cellphone to hook up with the two.4-GHz band. Since this band has a greater vary, your smartphone will finally change from 5 GHz with sufficient distance. This would possibly imply carrying your robotic vacuum out into the yard, which isn’t supreme.

Create a Guest Network

You could desire to not have two separate networks or discover that your mesh router doesn’t assist band splitting. For instance, Google’s Nest WiFi doesn’t assist you to cut up bands. You can usually get round this concern by making a visitor community, which solely operates on the two.4-GHz band. (By default, most visitor networks run on this band.)

Guest networks are designed to allow guests to your private home to hook up with your Wi-Fi community with out giving them entry to the identical community as all of your units. Both networks have entry to the web, however solely units on the identical community can discuss immediately to one another, which might be helpful for sharing recordsdata or printing. Visitors on visitor networks can’t infect any of your devices with malware (not that they might do that intentionally, however they might be unwittingly contaminated).