> The obvious advice for roaming is “use one SSID everywhere”, and that is often correct if you’re running Wi-Fi in an office, a public venue, or generally somewhere where you don’t have (or care about) legacy devices.
What difference does the presence of legacy devices make? Is the intent to isolate them from modern devices from a network perspective? Then create a separate SSID on both 2.4 and 5 GHz for modern devices.
I can't think of any legitimate reason for split SSIDs anymore. Linux clients used to be pretty bad at preferring 5 over 2.4 GHz if RSSIs were both excellent but 2.4 was slightly better, but I haven't seen that in years.
I've seen claims that the wifi 6E spec mandated that 6ghz networks required WPA3, so you would need to have a separate WPA2 ssid for legacy devices which therefore couldn't include 6ghz. A lot of access points now support a single SSID with all 3 bands using both WPA2 and WPA3, but I don't know if that is due to a change in the spec or if access points are violating the spec by offering that.
Can’t one SSID support different WPA versions across APs? I’m pretty sure all my devices just shrugged and connected when I downgraded my (single AP) SSID from WPA3/2 to 2 only and back up to 3/2.
Which is a bit sad, but also seems like it would allow this use case perfectly (assuming this was done on purpose and not just an oversight).
There is zero benefit to using 2.4 for me, really, since it's crowded as heck. I'd rather skip it altogether.
Most IoT devices support 2.4GHz only. Notably this applies to ESP32-based devices and older phones and laptops too. I would argue that it is the 5GHz band that is optional, the only benefit (bandwidth), being relevant only for laptops and phones when downloading something.
It penetrates walls so much better than 5GHz. If I lived closer to my neighbors I would agree with you.
Plus I still have some esp8266-based widgets that I made which only operate on 2.4GHz.
If you don't need it, of course, you might as well deactivate it. But if you do, I don't see the point of having two different SSIDs if you don't need them for another reason anyway.
I do need it, but the IoT devices are conveniently close to most APs, so that sort of evens out.
> I can't think of any legitimate reason for split SSIDs anymore.
Different networks / vlans / firewall rules.
These are all not splits by frequency, though.
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