Been thinking of getting something like this to extend wifi to the part of the house where other wifis cannot reach. I see some are described as single and some as dual band. Is there any way I can know which band I need if I don't currently have physical access to the router?
It just means 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. Most modern stuff will feature both. They invented a special naming soup to ensure that you can't translate from the specifications to anything meaningful. They had a
b then a
g then an
n then an
ac because that's how the nunderguffins behind all this do their alphabet. For god's sake, no one ask them to count.
I can say all this with relative confidence as I spent Friday evening looking at stupid device wifi spec.
2.4 GHz wifi rays can get further and are less admonished by walls and sturdy masonry but don't offer the same bandwidth, 5 GHz have more bandwidth but don't get as a far. Most modern devices will use either but some stuff still uses the 2.4 band exclusively. Most devices have some clever stuff to decide which it prefers and like all clever stuff it probably won't work.
In the end I went for the BT discs as I got a good deal on them. A doodle to set up and full speed throughout the house. Oddly if I introduce a third disc it seems to slow the system down. At least that’s what my son reports...
I am tempted by this one but for the lack of ethernet ports (it has one, but there's a place behind the living room foliage were having two would be very useful).
There's a TP-Link Deco M5 (oh, don't get me going on product names, I defy anyone to figure out Netgear's wifi offerings) which seems OK and broadly similar. There's also a Tenda something-or-other which actually seems OK, I don't need massive performance, there's two of us, no teenagers and the cats are banned from the internet after last time. Or could spend several hundred quid so I can brag to people at parties about my massive bandwidth.
That's what our attenuated social skills will be like post-Covid.