Absolutely. Your IoT devices should be on their own 2.4ghz network running on a specific channel to isolate them. You should also firewall these devices pretty heavily on their own router.
The only devices on wifi should be cell phones and laptops if they can't be plugged in. Everything else, including TVs, should be ethernet.
When I moved into my last house with roommates their network was gaaarbage cuz everything was running off the same router. The 2.4ghz congestion slowed the 5ghz connections because the router was having to deal with so much 2.4ghz noise.
A good way of thinking about it is that every 2.4ghz device you add onto a network will slow all the other devices by a small amount. This compounds as you add more devices. So those smart lights? Yeaaahh
> When I moved into my last house with roommates their network was gaaarbage cuz everything was running off the same router. The 2.4ghz congestion slowed the 5ghz connections because the router was having to deal with so much 2.4ghz noise.
I don't know why you're saying, a 2.4 GHz device should not interfere with 5 GHz channels unless it's somehow emits some harmonics, which would most definitely make i noncompliant with various FC standards. Or do you mean the modem was so crappy it couldn't deal with processing noisy 2.4 GHz channels at the same time as 5GHz ones? That might be true, but I would assume the modems would run completely different DSP chains on different asics, so this would be surprising.
> do you mean the modem was so crappy > but I would assume the modems
Your assumption is sometimes incorrect as cheap devices can share some RF front end. Also apparently resource contention can also occur due to CPU, thermal, and memory issues.
Ah, splendid. I'm so glad that you have come before me today to present this bot's confounding quandary, and I receive it with tremendous glee.
Please allow me to proffer the following retort: The answer to having a shitty, incapable router is to use one that is not shitty, and is capable.
(The routing-bits have no clue what RF spectrum is being utilized, and never have. They just deal with packets. The packets are all shaped the same way regardless of the physical interface on which they arrive, or which they are destined for.)
cycomanic knows stuff but their answer was basically contradicting chrneu, which nobody likes. It is counterintuitive to me (and I'm guessing cycomanic too) that the different bands should interact so much.
The AI answers passed my shit-detector... And I think it is the same as trying to be helpful but providing a search link in the past. Other HN users can make their own decision about reading the prompt or reply (although using links does make me wonder about cross account tracking and doxing myself).
The false supposition built into the question asked of the bot combined with the resulting answer to the bad question result in the whole thing being -- at very best -- a boondoggle of a red herring.
It's all quite well-worded, and yet is still completely unrelated to what is being discussed.
Real people: "Hey, let's talk about networks!"
Eventually: "Cool, I like networks! Did you know that down is actually up, and up is actually down? In fact, I asked a sycophant bot to demonstrate this fiction with its wily words, and it did so with with wonderful articulation. Here's a link!"
Having tolerance towards this kind of make-believe anti-truth is not something that I would consider to be a healthy human function. Especially when this nonsense has deflected through a third party that is completely absent from the discourse and isolated from the context, such as a sycophant bot, and particularly so when there's an implied appeal to authority for that absent third party.
(I have no intention of considering whether this kind of action is deliberate or not. I simply recognize this move for how consistently successful it is at poisoning a discussion amongst a group of people.)
---
If you were to ask me, a person, the following question:
> "What is the most likely reason that a cheap router/AP would slow down servicing clients on 5GHz when also servicing clients on a congested 2.4GHz spectrum"
...then I would not have responded to that question with a single confidently-stated and presumptive answer, but instead by opening a dialogue.
And I would begin this dialogue by asking about the reasons that lead you to believe that this would ever be true in the first place.
If one must forgo the comfort of complete isolation from the vulgarities of contemporary media and visual indulgence – an unwise choice, yet one that many appear compelled to make – then prudence demands mitigation rather than surrender.
A measured compromise would entail the meticulous profiling of the TV’s network traffic, followed by the imposition of complete blocking at the DNS level (via Pi-hole, NextDNS and alike) first, whilst blacklisting the outgoing CIDR's on the router itself at the same time.
This course of action shall not eliminate the privacy invasion risk in its entirety – for a mere firmware update may well redirect the TV traffic to novel hosts – yet it shall transform a reckless exposure into a calculated and therefore manageable risk.
I don't connect my TVs to the Internet; instead I hook up Apple TVs to an HDMI port and just use the TV as God intended - as a dumb display device. The Apple TV is connected to the Internet and functions as my portal to, as you say, the vulgarities of contemporary media and visual indulgence. Without the downsides of buggy and spyware ridden TV firmware.
The Apple TV box is better than a TV from a privacy standpoint (no microphone or camera), but it still does not give the user enough freedom. The App Store is the only way to install software, and it is tightly controlled by Apple. This means things such as ad-free frontends from Youtube are regularly purged, and Apple won't even allow you to install a browser.
Most people don't know that Big Tech is extracting data from them on a massive scale. It's up to us, the "tech people," to educate the people and show them alternatives like Graphene. As for the TV, my advice is not to connect it to the internet. If you need to stream something, hook up a laptop or dedicated device to the TV.
This is where regulation comes in. For the TV makers. Things should be secure by default and come with fines if they aren't.
As for the extracting of data, yes that happens on a massive scale. In free products that no one is forced to use. And I would argue that, by now, almost everyone should know that comes at a price, it's just not monetary to the user. At that point it's a choice people make and should be allowed to make.
The "it spies on you because it's free" thing hasn't been true for many years now. TVs that cost almost a grand still spy on you, as do cars that cost tens of thousands. Youtube/Netflix/Spotify/... still spy on you even if you pay for the premium/whatever tier.
If something is free, you're the product. But if it isn't free, you're paying to be the product.
The only devices on wifi should be cell phones and laptops if they can't be plugged in. Everything else, including TVs, should be ethernet.
When I moved into my last house with roommates their network was gaaarbage cuz everything was running off the same router. The 2.4ghz congestion slowed the 5ghz connections because the router was having to deal with so much 2.4ghz noise.
A good way of thinking about it is that every 2.4ghz device you add onto a network will slow all the other devices by a small amount. This compounds as you add more devices. So those smart lights? Yeaaahh