Sometimes I don’t work from home but at my family’s or a friend’s place. Turns out the router at one of these places is terrible and can’t reliably provide WiFi for my laptop sitting some 4 meters away (with 2 doors in between). I thought this was rather odd because my phone didn’t struggle with this so I asked around and thought about it some and the most obvious culprit seems to be the WiFi radio band that’s used.
Current routers will use either a radio band frequency of 2.4 or 5 GHz and a client should be able to select the best choice for itself which clearly isn’t happening in this case. So I went and checked the frequency in use when the WiFi was struggling and sure enough it was 5 GHz. Usually, this would be the preferred one because it’s more stable and allows more throughput (as far as I know) but it also has less range. So I wanted to try and select the 2.4 GHz frequency exclusively and see if that would do the trick and what can I say? It did! Here’s how:
I have to preface this solution with that it will only work, if you’re using
NetworkManager to manage your WiFi. If you do, you should have an
application called nm-connection-editor installed. Then you have to:
- Start
nm-connection-editorfrom a terminal - Select the relevant SSID
- Click on the cog icon to edit the connection
- In the tab “Wi-Fi” find the “Band” option and select the one you want
- Click “Save”
Done!