I blamed my ISP for random Wi-Fi drops until I changed this single router setting

Published Jul 24, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT Monica J. White is a journalist with over a decade of experience in covering technology. She built her first PC nearly 20 years ago, and she has since built and tested dozens of PCs. PC hardware is her main beat, and graphics cards and the GPU market at large are her main area of interest, but she has written thousands of articles covering everything related to PCs, laptops, handhelds, and peripherals. From GPUs and CPUs to headsets and software, Monica's always willing to geek out over all things related to computing. Outside of her work with How-To Geek, Monica contributes to TechRadar, PC Gamer, Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, SlashGear, Whop, and Digital Trends, among others. Her ultimate goal is to make PC gaming and computing approachable and fun to any audience. Monica spends a lot of time elbow-deep in her PC case, as she's always making upgrades, testing something, or plotting out her next build. She's the go-to tech support person in her immediate circle, so she's never out of things to do. Whenever she has spare time, you'll find her gaming until the early hours and hanging out with her dog. Most routers will encourage you to use one Wi-Fi name for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Sure, why not. In theory, your devices should work together to pick the best band automatically. But in my home, they didn't always make the right choices. Surprisingly, hiding the faster, better 5GHz network was the solution I was looking for. My devices were choosing the wrong Wi-Fi band One network name made the problem difficult to spot Hiding the 5GHz network sounds pretty backwards, but only until you see what my devices were getting up to beforehand. With both bands sharing one Wi-Fi name, everything looked normal from outside. My phone, Kindle, laptop, and TV were all happily showing the same network, but I had no immediate way to tell whether they were actually using 2.4GHz or 5GHz. And the difference there can be huge. As it turned out, some of them were sticking to 2.4GHz even when they were close enough to the router for a strong 5GHz connection. The lower frequency band travels farther and handles walls better, so it often appeared to be the safer choice to the device. That stronger signal didn't always translate into better performance, though, which is obviously what I was after. (Well, duh.) Things got even worse once neighboring networks started competing for the limited 2.4GHz airspace. This made the random slowdowns difficult to diagnose. The Wi-Fi icon still showed a healthy full set of bars, but that can be misleading. Full bars or not, downloads, streaming, and local transfers were pretty darn miserable. UGREEN Cat 8 Ethernet Cable When in doubt, switch to Ethernet -- especially for stuff that never leaves a specific room. Hiding 5GHz created a controlled split Only devices I configured could connect to it Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek The fix was to stop leaving things up to my various smattering of devices. It was time to take matters into my own hands here. I split the bands, kept 2.4GHz visible, and hid the 5GHz network. To try this yourself, open your router settings, then disable SSID broadcasting for the 5GHz network and connect your chosen devices to it manually. Once I did that, only the devices I deliberately configured with the hidden network's exact name and password could join it. My laptop, phone, TV, and gaming console already had those details saved, so they could reconnect automatically without the 5GHz network appearing in the regular Wi-Fi list. Everything else naturally fell into place (which was nice), ending up on the visible 2.4GHz network instead. That gave me a simple way to reserve 5GHz for the devices that could actually benefit from it, while random smart home gear and anything farther from the router got to stick to the longer-range band (2.4GHz). The speed came from staying on 5GHz Credit: Bertel King / How-To Geek With all that said, this solution wasn't exactly a "speed increase." The cleaner split made the improvement pretty obvious, but it's not like the hidden network itself was up to some magical stuff. Turning off SSID broadcasting doesn't increase signal strength, widen the channel, or give 5GHz extra bandwidth. My devices were faster because they were finally staying on the band I wanted instead of flip-flopping however they wanted to. I basically fixed an annoying bottleneck rather than straight-up "improving" anything. And when 5GHz has a solid signal, that can make a huge difference. It usually has more room to breathe, supports wider channels, and avoids much of the congestion that constantly plagues 2.4GHz. Of course, it still isn't the right choice everywhere. A device several rooms away may still do better with 2.4GHz, but that's the whole point of this exercise: you get to pick. Separating the network names is the better version You can control the bands without hiding either one Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek That whole control was useful, but hiding the network wasn't the only way to get it. A cleaner approach is to give the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands separate, visible names, such as Home-2.4 and Home-5. That way, you can connect each device to the band you actually want without manually entering a hidden SSID every time you add or reset something. To set this up, open your router's app or web interface, disable Smart Connect or band steering, then give the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands different SSID names. Save the changes, reconnect each device to the band you want, and forget the old shared network name so it doesn't default back to it. This also makes troubleshooting way easier. You can see at a glance which band a device is using, switch it when the connection is poor, and avoid the compatibility issues that sometimes crop up with hidden Wi-Fi networks. The useful part was knowing what goes where In the end, hiding the 5GHz band was less important than finally having a clear plan for my network. Phones, laptops, consoles, and TVs stayed on the faster band when they were close enough to benefit, while smart home gadgets and anything farther away used 2.4GHz. Another way to tidy things up connection-wise is to map your home network, which I've also done. ASUS RT-BE92U BE9700 Tri-Band WiFi 7 Router Brand ASUS Wi-Fi Bands 6 GHz, 5 GHz, 2.4 GHz A tri-band router leaves you spoiled for choice, and this Asus model supports 6GHz.