The publisher. smarthomegenius.site is written and published independently by Vanshika. Amazon.com, Inc. owns no part of it, funds no part of it and has approved no part of it, and the same goes for every other maker, seller or brand owner whose equipment turns up on these pages. Amazon runs its own website, and support for Alexa belongs there.
The edges of it. Explanation in writing is all that gets made here, and the list of what does not exist is worth stating outright. No number has ever been published. Nobody sits and advises. Nothing gets reached into from elsewhere, no fault is traced, no login is put back, and no piece of hardware is repaired. Across the whole site there is not one field asking for a password, a card, or any detail belonging to you, and nowhere to log in even if there were.
Whoever holds the Alexa name holds it still, as with Echo and Echo Dot. They turn up on these pages because there is no other way to indicate which hardware is meant. Should a piece of your own equipment have actually failed, that is a matter for its maker or for the shop that sold it.
Wi-Fi bands · plain English
Why your network list shows two entries, what the 5G on the end means, and which one a smart speaker can actually use.
Those two names are a single router publishing its two radios separately. The one without the suffix reaches further and copes better with walls.
That is what a speaker wants, because it sits still and sends almost nothing. Many Echo models cannot see a 5 GHz network at all, which is why it never appears in the list.
Start here
Whatever your handset shows under Wi-Fi is the thing to go by. Tap whichever matches.
Tap what matches your network list
Your answer appears just underneath
General guidance on what each arrangement means. Your own router's literature covers your case.
How far each one travels
Tap how far the speaker sits from the router, and watch what each band does.
Tap the distance that matches
Your answer appears just underneath
A description of how radio behaves. We cannot measure your particular house.
In more detail
The reason is older than any Echo, and it has nothing to do with the speaker being cheap.
A router broadcasts on two separate radio frequencies. The lower one, at 2.4 GHz, has been in use since domestic Wi-Fi began. The higher one, at 5 GHz, arrived later and shifts far more data per second.
Physics decides the rest. A lower frequency travels further and surrenders less of itself to brick, plaster and floorboards. A higher one carries more but fades faster and is stopped more easily. Neither is better; they are built for different jobs.
An Echo sends almost nothing. A spoken instruction is a few seconds of audio; a reply is a few seconds more. Against a television streaming video, the volume is trivial.
What a speaker does need is a connection that holds for months without attention, from wherever it happens to sit — a shelf, a bedside table, a kitchen worktop two rooms from the router. Reach matters enormously; speed does not. Many Echo models therefore carry a radio for the lower band only, and simply cannot see a 5 GHz network at all.
Many routers publish both radios under a single name and decide for themselves which each device receives. Convenient in principle, and the source of a particular confusion in practice: a handset may be placed on the faster band while the speaker needs the slower one, and the setup screen then shows a network the speaker cannot join.
Nothing is broken when this happens. The two devices are simply looking at different halves of the same router.
The number is larger, so it reads as better. For anything that streams video in the same room as the router, it is. For a speaker on another floor it is the wrong answer: the connection forms, then drops as conditions shift through the day, and the fault looks intermittent and inexplicable.
One solid wall takes a great deal out of the higher frequency and very little out of the lower one. That single fact explains most of what seems arbitrary about which devices stay connected and which do not.
Beyond Wi-Fi
Some household devices never touch your Wi-Fi at all. Tap one to see why.
Tap a protocol
Your answer appears just underneath
An account of how these are built to work. Nothing here reaches your equipment.
Questions
Each answer opens where you tap it.
Most routers allow the two radios to be published under separate names, and some let one be switched off temporarily. Where the option exists it sits in the router's own configuration, reached through a browser.
That is a matter for whoever supplied the router, and their documentation covers it. Providers differ enormously in what they permit on their own equipment.
Not in any way that can be heard. Streamed music needs a small fraction of what even the slower band carries; video is what makes the difference, and a speaker has no picture.
A speaker on 2.4 GHz that holds a steady connection will sound better than one on 5 GHz that keeps dropping, because interruption is what people actually notice.
Because a laptop, a handset and a television all carry radios for both bands, and choose whichever suits. A good many Echo models carry only the one, and that is a decision made in the factory rather than a setting anywhere.
There is nothing to adjust. The network the speaker can see is the one it will use.
Often, yes — not by changing the band but by shortening the distance. Mesh units placed around a house mean nothing is ever far from one, and both bands then perform where they are needed.
It is a considerably larger purchase than a speaker, and worth weighing against simply moving the speaker nearer the router.
Keep going
All free to read, all published here.