Here's the thing most people never get told when the technician walks out the door: your router isn't broadcasting one Wi-Fi network. It's broadcasting two, sometimes three, on completely different radio frequencies. If you've ever seen "MyHome" and "MyHome_5G" in your Wi-Fi list and assumed the second one was a mistake — no. That's the good one.
Those frequencies are called bands, and the difference between them decides whether your evening is pleasant or irritating.
2.4GHz goes far. 5GHz goes fast.
2.4GHz is the old workhorse. It's been around since Wi-Fi was a novelty, and its great strength is reach — the signal pushes through brick walls, floors and the sort of solid double-brick construction you find in older South African homes without losing too much of itself along the way. Your outside camera and the garage door opener are almost certainly on it.
The trouble is that it's slow by modern standards, and it's crowded. Not just with your Wi-Fi — with your neighbours' Wi-Fi too, and with cordless phones, baby monitors, Bluetooth gear and, yes, microwave ovens. In a townhouse complex you might have fifteen routers all shouting across the same handful of channels. They interfere with each other and everyone's throughput suffers.
5GHz is the opposite bargain. Far more channels, much less congestion, several times the speed. What it gives up is distance. Walls chew into it badly, and a 5GHz signal that's flying at one end of the house can be fairly miserable three rooms away. That trade — reach versus speed — is the whole story of home Wi-Fi in one sentence.
Then there's 6GHz, which arrived with Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7. Think of it as 5GHz with more elbow room: enormous capacity, almost nothing else using it yet, and even less patience for walls. Newer phones and laptops support it. A five-year-old smart plug never will.
So why does your phone pick badly?
Because devices are stubborn, and their logic is cruder than you'd expect.
When your phone joins a network it grabs whichever signal looks strongest at that moment, then it holds on. You connect in the bedroom on 2.4GHz because that's what reached you there, walk through to the lounge where 5GHz is available and excellent, and your phone just... stays put. It sees a working connection and sees no reason to change. This is called sticky client behaviour, and it's the single most common cause of the "full bars but slow" complaint I hear.
Older routers make it worse by splitting the two bands into separate network names, which leaves the choice to you and your guests, who will inevitably tap the wrong one. Newer routers usually merge them under a single name and try to shuffle devices between bands automatically — that's band steering. Whether it works well depends enormously on how good the router is at it, and the free box that came bundled with your fibre package is, in my experience, not good at it.
What actually helps
If your router shows two network names, connect anything that lives near the router — TV, work laptop, PlayStation, the desktop in the study — to the 5GHz one deliberately. Save 2.4GHz for the far-flung stuff and the smart-home gadgets that can't use anything else. Plenty of smart plugs and older cameras flatly refuse to join a 5GHz network, which is why merging the bands into one name occasionally causes setup headaches and why some people end up keeping them separate on purpose.
If you can only reach the fast band in one room, that's a coverage problem, not a band problem. No amount of fiddling in the settings fixes physics. You need the signal to originate closer to where you're sitting, which means a properly designed mesh rather than one router working heroically from the corner of the house.
This is a decent part of why we push Plume. A Plume system doesn't just spread the signal around — it watches how every device behaves, learns the shape of your home, and moves clients between bands and between pods on its own as conditions change. When the neighbour's router starts stepping on your channel, it shifts. Your phone stops being the one making the decision, which is good, because your phone is bad at it.
Worth doing tonight: open your Wi-Fi settings and look at what your phone is actually connected to. If it says 2.4GHz and you're standing next to the router, forget the network, reconnect, and watch what changes. Small thing. Often a surprising difference.
And if the honest answer is that the fast band doesn't reach half your house, talk to us. That's a solvable problem, and it's a cheaper one to solve than most people assume.