You may have heard that the 5g cellular router is a better choice than the 2.4G cellular router because it is faster than the 2.4G cellular router. But have you ever wondered why the 5g cellular router is faster than the 2.4g cellular router.
In this article, we will break down the issue and help you clarify this.
First of all, it should be made clear that 5G here is not the concept of the fifth generation mobile communication, but the 5GHz band, and 2.4G is the 2.4GHz band.
Both 5G and 2.4G represent the frequency of the carrier radio wave.
Wi-Fi, as it is known, is based on the IEEE 802.11standard, which divides the radio carrier into different frequency bands, and for each frequency band it is divided into multiple channels. Of these separate bands, 2.4GHz and 5GHz are the best known.
The frequency range of the 2.4GHz carrier is from 2.412 GHz to 2.472 GHz, and this frequency range is divided into 13 channels, which are the channels on which we configure the router. For 5 GHz, the carrier ranges from 5.180 GHz to 5.825 GHz, and the frequency range is divided into more than 25 channels.
As we mentioned before, 5G routers use 5GHz radio waves as their carrier, while 2.4G routers choose 2.4GHz radio waves as their carrier, which is why 5G routers are faster than 2.4G routers.
According to the famous formula f = 1/λ, which describes the relationship between wavelength and wave frequency, we can know that the higher the wave frequency is, the shorter the wave wavelength is. In other words, the carrier of the 5 GHz band has a higher frequency and a shorter wavelength than that of the 2.4 GHz band.
To incorporate messages into the radio waves, we use a technique called modulation. As we all know, analog signals, such as our voice, are sampled to produce digital signals, and modulation is the process of mapping the sampled digital signals to a carrier wave. In this paper, we only introduce the simplest modulation method, called amplitude modulation or AM.
Suppose we want to transmit the voice message "Hello." First, as we introduced, the voice is sampled to produce a digital signal, which is assumed to be a combination of 0 and 1, such as "101011.". The modulator then maps' 101011 'to the carrier, as shown in the following figure:
As we have introduced, the frequency of the 5GHz band is higher than that of the 2.4GHz band, that is, the 5GHz band can accommodate more carriers per unit time, or can carry more information than the 2.4GHz band.
On the other hand, the standard bandwidth of 2.4GHz is 20MHz, which can be extended to 40MHz, while the bandwidth of 5GHz band can reach 40MHz, 80MHz and even 160MHz. According to the famous Shannon formula C = Blog2 (1 + S/N), the higher the bandwidth, the larger the channel capacity.
