Different wireless speeds on the same band

Does having a N device on the same band (for example the 5GHz band) as an AC device slow down the AC device? I'm not sure if I should use the n/ac mix and allow N devices on my 5GHZ band or if this will slow down my AC devices on there.

The N devices on my network do not slow down my AC devices other than the standard slowdown that comes with more devices on the same channel.

If you transfer files from one PC in 802.11N mode and other PC on AC mode , you get the max of the N mode. If it is N300 you will get max. 25MB/s / 2=12,5MB/s. On the other hand, if you put the N PC on 2.4GHz Band you will get the full 25MB/s speed

Do 802.11n (and older) devices slow down 802.11ac ... - NETGEAR Communities

It is only the wireless preamble that is affected by multimode/legacy operation, so your AC devices will not be held back in any significant way.

Again, the only slowdown to the AC devices is the bandwidth sharing with the N devices. An active N device does NOT pull the entire WiFi network down to N speeds. Now, an N device will take longer to transfer a file. So your bandwidth will be split between the two devices for a longer period of time when the file is being transferred to the N device than if it was two AC devices sharing the channel. But the AC device will still continue to transfer data at the full AC rate when the channel is free between the packets being sent to the N device - it just has to share the channel for a longer period of time with the N device than another AC device for the same size of file being transferred.

NavyLCDR said:

Do 802.11n (and older) devices slow down 802.11ac ... - NETGEAR Communities



Again, the only slowdown to the AC devices is the bandwidth sharing with the N devices. An active N device does NOT pull the entire WiFi network down to N speeds. Now, an N device will take longer to transfer a file. So your bandwidth will be split between the two devices for a longer period of time when the file is being transferred to the N device than if it was two AC devices sharing the channel. But the AC device will still continue to transfer data at the full AC rate when the channel is free between the packets being sent to the N device - it just has to share the channel for a longer period of time with the N device than another AC device for the same size of file being transferred.

Gotcha, so there is no downside to putting all my N devices on the 5Ghz channel with my AC devices? I was going to seclude them all to the 2.4ghz band so they didn't effect my AC which are all on the 5, but I'm guessing that won't be an issue.

bobsagetfullhou said:

Gotcha, so there is no downside to putting all my N devices on the 5Ghz channel with my AC devices? I was going to seclude them all to the 2.4ghz band so they didn't effect my AC which are all on the 5, but I'm guessing that won't be an issue.

That all depends on how much you want to split the bandwidth up. If you want to maintain a major highway connection to a specific device then you should limit the devices on that channel. At my house I have both 2.4ghz and 5ghz channels set to the same SSID and just let the various devices figure out what they want to connect to. I do not notice any stuttering or anything on any of my wireless devices and speedtest.net on all them still manages to pull the maximum download speed available from my internet connection. If I want the major highway bandwidth to transfer big files to/from NAS then I plug in a gigabit Ethernet cable.