How to get ASUS Smart Connect to favour 2.4Ghz to a greater extent

I have a case where in one room of my house my laptop keeps trying to connect via 5 GHz and it goes terribly. Frequent dropouts on 5 and the 2.4 network goes fine.

The Smart Connect documentation does not provide advice on this issue. Ideally, the documentation would come with concrete instructions for tweaks to deal with common situations like mine.

So, how do I tweak the advanced ASUS Smart Connect settings to either 1) stop these dropouts on 5 GHz (are they a result of poor connection or Smart Connect malfunctioning?) or 2) get the network to stick to 2.4 GHz on my laptop when 5 GHz has poor connection quality?

2 Answers

It is normal that the 5 GHz network is faster but its range is shorter. Your PC is probably just far enough away from the router so that the 5 GHz gets too weak to work stable.

• You can simply use two different SSIDs for the 2.4 GHz and the 5 GHz networks (setting at your router), and never connect the 5 GHz SSID from your laptop.
• Also, it looks like the whole idea of the SmartConnect utility is to mix usage between the two as possible; if you don't want that, simple don't use SmartConnect.
• Third, there are settings up to which quality level ('-nn db') the SmartConnect should try to use each network; you can change this setting a bit up for the 5 GHz network, so it wouldn't be used if it is too weak.

Even if the 5 GHz sometimes works, overall you're probably better off to only use the 2.4 GHz, and have a stable connection. Consider that the higher speed is probably only theoretical, as the connection out to the internet is slower than even the 2.4 GHz speed - don't look at the nominal speed that your ISP sells you, but the speed your connection partner delivers on its server! For example, even if you have a 10 GBit/s line, Netflix only serves you 50 Mbit/s)

My answer is intended for the laptop, rather than the router, and is based on the post How to set wifi driver settings to prefer 5 GHz channel above 2.4 GHz, except that I reversed the advice so as to prefer the 2.4 GHz channel.

You first need to get the name of your network interface. You may use for that iwconfig. It's assumed here to be wlan0.

Run:

$ iwlist wlan0 scanning | grep -C3 <name of your network> 

(For some computers C3 may need to be replaced by C5 or else.)

You should find 2 entries for the network, for example:

Cell XX - Address: 11:11:11:11:11:11 // This will be different in your machine ESSID: "name of your network" // This will be different on your machine Protocol: IEEE 802.11bgn Mode: Master Frequency: 2.437 Ghz -- Cell XX - Address: 22:22:22:22:22:22 // This will be different on your machine ESSID: "name of your network // This will be different on your machine Protocol: IEEE 802.11AC Mode: Master Frequency: 5.18 Ghz 

• BSSID for the 5Ghz Network, in this example: 22:22:22:22:22:22
• BSSID for the 2.4 Ghz Network, in this example: 11:11:11:11:11:11

Now what you do is:

1. click on 'Network Connections'
2. 'Edit Connections...'
3. [Select your network connection] (there could be 2 entries, any will do)
4. Click Edit
5. Go to 'Wi-Fi' or 'Wireless' Tab
6. Click the BSSID Dropdown
7. Select the BSSID Matching the 2.4 Ghz Network (11:11:11:11:11:11 in this example)
8. Switch to the 'General Tab'
9. Make sure to check the checkbox that is labelled: 'Automatically connect to this network when it is available'
10. Rename the Connection Name (not the SSID) to 'your network name'_AC
11. Click Save
12. If there were 2 entries for 'your network name' in your Network Connections list, proceed with next step, otherwise go to the last step.
13. Click on the other 'your network name' entry
14. Click Edit
15. Go to 'Wi-Fi' or 'Wireless' Tab
16. Click the BSSID Dropdown
17. Select the BSSID Matching the 5 Ghz Network (22:22:22:22:22:22 in this example) OR leave the BSSID empty if there are multiple other secondary access points
18. Switch to the 'General' Tab
19. Uncheck the checkbox that is labelled: 'Automatically connect to this network when it is available'
20. Set the 'Connection name' to [your network name]_N
21. Click Save...
22. Disconnect from your network and re-connect

You should now be connected to the 2.4Ghz network, and you would have to explicitly do the opposite process in order to connect to the 5 Ghz Network.