I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
Strictly speaking, in a vacuum, there is no difference in propagation range between 2.4GHz and 5GHz with all other factors being equal. All that matters is initial energy.
However, that’s not very useful in practice for two reasons:
The way that 2.4GHz and 5GHz interact with solid objects is different. Depending on the material, the likelihood of reflection versus absorption versus transmission actually does vary with respect to frequency. 2.4 GHz tends to reflect off of or propagate through most common building materials, while 5 GHz tends to be absorbed more readily. This leads to a lower effective range for 5GHz in most settings.
The usable channels for 5 GHz have different allowed transmit power limits, and APs which auto-select ‘open’ channels tend to be more likely to select those channels which have lower transmit power limits because they will by definition have less activity. For example, in the US, 36-50 and 149-165 have a 1W max transmit power, while the others are capped at 0.25W.
These two factors combined mean that in the traditional setup of a single AP for a house or business, 5 GHz really does have less effective range. It’s not a ‘myth’, it’s just not some inherent aspect of ‘’5 GHz’ like everyone seems to imply.
Overall though, this is part of why ESS setups (sometimes (not always accurately) called ‘mesh’ setups in consumer marketing material) are so useful, and the limitations of 5 GHz are what is pushing their adoption in consumer settings.
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Strictly speaking, in a vacuum, there is no difference in propagation range between 2.4GHz and 5GHz with all other factors being equal. All that matters is initial energy.
However, that’s not very useful in practice for two reasons:
These two factors combined mean that in the traditional setup of a single AP for a house or business, 5 GHz really does have less effective range. It’s not a ‘myth’, it’s just not some inherent aspect of ‘’5 GHz’ like everyone seems to imply.
Overall though, this is part of why ESS setups (sometimes (not always accurately) called ‘mesh’ setups in consumer marketing material) are so useful, and the limitations of 5 GHz are what is pushing their adoption in consumer settings.