5 GHz band flooded with other 5 GHz routers

[bchiang83]

The cool thing about wifi routers like asus is that you actually get more 5 ghz channels to use than ISP given routers. I find that people barely upgrade their ISP given routers and those that buy their own routers usually only do so 5-10 years when their old router becomes the bottleneck significantly. For example in the UK, the AC88U has 1 channel that is unused by all ISP given routers that is used in the UK which is the highest common 5Ghz channel among router manufacturers like asus or netgear or even dlink (basically dependent on the hardware used). The 3 band radio, the 3rd radio uses channels that no ISP given router uses in the UK.

So find out what sort of ISP routers are in your area(just look for their GUI simulators or configuration summaries or even wikidevi for details of what channels they use and get a router that has a channel they dont have. The reason is that there are so many routers out there, many of them ill-configured and their auto will tend to use the channel your AP uses even if theres a lot of extra space. So getting a router that has channels not used by ISP given routers is something to look for.

In the US only transmit power is what the FCC is worried about but the US actually has the most 5Ghz channels available world wide. However router manufacturers only make routers with less than half the allowed channels in the US, they say its FCC Restrictions but the main thing about fcc restrictions are firmware tinkering and power transmission but they restrict channels because they're afraid of the FCC such as fines and banning products/recalls.

I actually have all channels available with my crappy modem/router combo from ATT. ASUS doesn't give me the 100-140 channels that's shared with radar. As you can see from the pic from my inssider, those are all open, so it would be great if I could use those. Alas, ASUS does not allow me to and I've tried googling how to telnet and enable those channels but all the nvram commands I've gotten do not seem to work. Also, I hear those channels are bad because they have a lot of radar interference so even though they look open, they're probably even more prone to interference

 

[bchiang83]

80MHz channels - the WiFi chips do have some agility and flexibility to move around inside that 80MHz channel - on 20MHz of that channel is used for the beacon, but Broadcom, QC-Atheros, Marvell - they can map around 20MHz interfering frames if found... I'm over-simplifiing it, but they do have a fair amount of latitude on which frequencies within that 80MHz channel (in an 80MHz channel, there's 4 blocks of 20MHz - 1 primary, and 3 supplementals)...

I still had ping spikes when I did 80MHz. They might've been happening even more often. I switched back to 20MHz

 

[sfx2000]

They don't do it for channel planning purposes because 80 MHz eats up too many channels?

In greenfield deployments - the 20/40/80MHz channel width options do provide flexibility... so that is a consideration - there's some interesting docs over on Cisco - I'll try to source a public link regarding some of the considerations - some are non-obvious at first, but do make sense - esp. in Hybrid environments (e.g. blended 11a/n/ac)...