I feel like the concept of using different names for each band is like the old habits where people would disable auto-speed negotiation on Ethernet. It used to cause a problem when it first came out, but all of those issues were solved long ago, and yet it has become lore for most network admins. It’s finally going away since 1Gb requires auto-speed, however I have no doubt many would still be disabling it if they could.

Same with the WiFi names. If systems can’t handle auto switching to the correct band, then fix those systems. Devices can easily handle roaming between different APs with the same SSID, and this should be no different.

Edit: I do see the point of doing it if you want to control the band usage, however I think that should be a special case and not considered the “standard” way to do things for regular people.

I separate them because things often do poor band choosing and things too far from an AP are using 5ghz when they should be picking 2.4 at that range. By separating I can choose which band I want this thing based on the coverage topology. Fwiw I’ve never found band steering to work well.

Finally I also selectively put devices into 2.4 just to keep my 5 band clearer.

Devices should have settings to explicitly prefer or only allow certain bands for a given SSID. Again it's a device problem.

The problem with the 5 GHz band is that it can be turned off any time because of radar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_frequency_selection

Only certain slices of it. The article you linked to mentions the frequencies in the US that must use DFS. This table in the article _it_ links to goes into much more detail. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels#4.9%E2%8...>

Look for the cells that contain "DFS" to see on which channels APs are required to channel hop if they believe they have heard radar.

In my personal experience, channel hopping works fine.

Ooooh. Now I wanna find out how I can fly over an area with a drone and make pictures like the example!

On a somewhat smaller, more theoretical note, I wonder what "a radar signal" is as far as a Wi-Fi SoC is concerned. Sounds like the wild-west, much-trickier-to-block counterpart to the old deauth packet attack. At least the FCC/etc can get shouty if needed...

Edit: Oh, right, it only goes offline if channel selection is manual. And presumably radar only uses the one band (?) so you couldn't flood it out or play cat and mouse.

Hmph, this is actually well designed. Given that this requires pretending to be a radar you might as well switch to a smaller pot of hot water and just get a 5.8GHz signal jammer.