This article will provide an overview of wifi channels, including how they work at a basic level, as well as access to more specific information about the channel capabilities of eero.
Channel Size–Overview
Wireless network traffic works by sending data over radio waves at a certain frequency. The ranges of radio wave frequencies are referred to as frequency bands, with wider bands offering higher speeds for data transfer. We refer to a channel’s bandwidth as a general measure of how fast data travels on that channel–the more bandwidth, the higher the speed.
While bandwidth is useful for speed, higher bandwidth is not necessarily suitable for every task or environment. Bandwidth has an inverse relationship with reception, meaning that higher bandwidth also means shorter connectivity range.
Frequency bandwidth–2.4, 5, and 6GHz
Bandwidth is measured in megahurtz (MHz), and channel widths increase in 20 MHz increments. For our purposes, the most relevant channel widths are 20, 40, 80, 160, 240, and 320 MHz. As mentioned above, the higher the bandwidth is for a given channel, the faster the connection speed will be when connected to it.
Typically, communication at lower bandwidth channels are handled by the 2.4 GHz frequency band. This is generally why connection speed on 2.4 GHz is slower than 5 GHz, but also why the connectivity range for 2.4 GHz is much larger than 5 GHz.
For the highest speeds, connections at 160 MHz and above are recommended. 160MHz is the highest bandwidth available on 5GHz routers. With double the throughput compared to 80MHz channels, it can achieve data rates up to 2.4Gbps on capable clients. If you’d like more information about which channels are supported by eero, check out our WiFi Product Comparison.
Client Compatibility
It is important to know that not all client devices support 160MHz wide channels. While devices that don’t support 160MHz will still connect to the network without issue, they’ll only be using half the available bandwidth and won’t see significant improvement compared to a router using 80MHz channels.
Using 160MHz channels requires the network to run within Dynamic Frequency Selection channels. If a network using 160MHz channels encounters a DFS strike, the network will dynamically switch to 80MHz operation until DFS is available again.