Yup. I didn't mention this because it feels a bit too much in the weeds to be helpful.

Bluntly, 2.4 GHz should be abandoned by pretty much all WiFi, only standing for the last remnants of legacy support, and for IoT devices that refuse to use 5Ghz. Everything of substance (phones, laptops, computers... Even TVs and STB's) should be on 5Ghz+

I'm also a fan of zwave, since it's usually in the otherwise abandoned (for consumer devices at least) 900mhz range.

I'm very strict about the RF airspace in my home. What operates on which bands and what's in use for which technology.

There's a ton more that can be said about it, but I need to get back to what I was doing. Have a great day.

I haven't found one. Many YouTubers are more interested in specs, reviews, benchmarks for a specific make/model of device, not talking about broad concepts like wireless strategy, placement, roaming, RF characteristics, etc.

I studied many online documents, took several networking courses, referenced physics information about electromagnetic transmission, I even got certified as an amateur radio operator to know all I do. A lot of one-off searches for information. What helped me with that was going through, in detail, just about every configuration option on a Cisco aironet wireless controller. They expose almost every option and wireless specification for the administrator to configure. It's far more advanced than anything from ubiquiti, or any other vendor. Most of the settings are fairly benign and probably should not be changed, so I get why that stuff isn't available for most, but some stuff is rather useful to be able to change. I just went through it, option by option, until I understood what every setting, protocol, and option changed and how it affected wireless coverage and performance.

I've been working on my knowledge of these systems over the past decade. I have probably forgotten more than I remember at this point.

I can't vouch for this particular playlist / series since I haven't watched it, but the channel (Crosstalk Solutions) is great, and so I expect that their home networking 101 is as well.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1fn6oC5ndU9l3eYa7S_s206JUpbIa-8m

My debian laptop always reconnects to my wifi automatically

The only annoying thing is it always asks for a password unless you set it to save the wifi credentials for everyone instead of encrypted.

I cant remember the exact wording of the option, but its in thr security tab of each wifi network

I haven't personally used Debian with WiFi like this. I've used Debian and Debian based distributions on laptops and I've used those to connect to WiFi, but I'm not a full time Linux user.

Since I work on the IT/support side, most of my support tools only run correctly on Windows. Sure, there are client/user side tools for Linux/Mac/Windows, but the technician tools are frequently Windows centric; so most of my stuff is installed with some flavour of Windows.

Most of my knowledge is out of date, but I seem to recall that you can save settings in the wpa supplicant for the network, and set the network manager to default to that wifi connection (ESSID/BSS) when it is in range/available. This was all done in config files, but I'm equally aware that a lot of the Linux networking subsystems have been pretty dramatically changed in the past ~5 years, so I doubt the settings I would have used for this, still exist.

I'm sorry I couldn't be more help here. I just don't have the long term experience with the issue.

I have an old laptop with Debian installed, and I can fire that up for testing and play with it... What version of Debian are you running? I want to make sure the version I have installed isn't so out of date that the testing I do won't help at all.

That system is just sitting on a shelf doing nothing, so it won't be a problem to pull it out and tinker with it for a while. I use a lot of Debian based stuff for servers, usually I'm using rasbian or Ubuntu, but AFAIK they're all very similar.

Basically non-existent. All of the flagship phones I've seen are 2x2 at most which caps out at ~800? Ish Mbps on wifi 5/6? Something like that? I don't have the numbers in front of me.

Simply: it's less important to see 1Gbps+ numbers on your mobile device. Many can't even process data that quickly, aside from maybe a speed test. So there's a point of diminishing returns where you're just eating your battery in order to process data as fast as possible, and it makes no observable difference to your online experience.

The main thing is that since wifi is half duplex, reducing the background noise on the WiFi, you'll get faster response times, because you're waiting less time for the wifi channel to clear so you can send/receive data. Lower ping = faster network response, which makes it feel faster. You only need 100-200 Mbps of bandwidth to satisfy most data needs for devices, and the only benefit to more bandwidth is when downloading files/apps/games, when you're simply waiting for the data to make it from the server to your device, and it's a large amount of data.

I only have 100mbps of internet bandwidth at home, and anytime I go to another location and use the WiFi, even if it has more bandwidth, it almost always feels more sluggish, because I've optimized everything I possibly can, within my network, to reduce response times for requests. This is most obvious with the 13th gen i7 I use for work. It's an incredibly responsive system, and I regularly need to take that system with me to go to work on a site (I work from home, with occasional on site visits required), and the sites I go to may have fiber which has significantly more bandwidth available, but lacks the optimizations I've implemented at home, and it still feels slower. Between the increased latency from a busier wireless network, and the lack of on-site DNS at many of the locations I go to, I notice the difference quite readily.

Keeping devices per ap low, and optimizing common sources of slowdowns like DNS response times, it's possible to make almost any "broadband" connection feel fast.

Well, there's also a lot of factors when it comes to things feeling sluggish.

For short periods of time, due to necessity, I've run very simple setups of just the service provider modem, and that could get me to around 10-15ms ping on a DSL line. After all my tweaking, I was running a modem line card (hwic) in my Cisco router, with a firewall and premium wifi. Which dropped response times by upwards of 10ms to ~5ms or so. I've further increased the responsiveness of my connection running a pair of raspberry pi systems which were set up as DNS caching relays using the bind DNS server.

The bandwidth never changed. But it felt a lot faster.

The next point was the firewall that I had in place was set up with QoS to limit the bandwidth of any one system, and manage the fair distribution of the available bandwidth among the devices on the network. This did less for making it feel fast, and was more for making it feel consistent. No matter what was happening on the network, there was always some bandwidth available for whatever else I wanted to do.

Most all in one wifi routers can't do a decent job of QoS, so if someone decides to fire up a download at the full internet bandwidth, everything else slows to a crawl.

I'm kind of an odd case though. I'm a professional Network administrator, and my home network is often better run than my client's networks.

It's downright unusual if I need to restart any of my network equipment to fix a problem. I get frustrated when I have to call my ISP to fix a problem. Usually by the time I call, I already know what the problem is, where it is, and what needs to be done to fix it. So their usual script of restarting the modem and blah blah blah, does exactly nothing, because I've already run through more diagnostics than they even know about. It's a pretty rare case when I can tell them that I have x problem and need y solution, and they'll actually listen. When they do, it saves a lot of time for both them and me. When they refuse to listen, I usually just humor them for about 15 minutes, at which point either they're doing what I want them to, or I'm yelling at them for making my life difficult and asking to speak to a manager. I don't easily suffer fools that think I don't know what I'm doing. I always try to keep my cool because they're just doing their job, and I don't want to make trouble; by the time I'm yelling, it's because they've made trouble for me, or spoken to be like I'm an idiot who can't tell the difference between an ethernet cable and a telephone jack.

I'm way off topic at this point. There's plenty of factors that weigh into whether a connection feels sluggish or not, of which, only one is bandwidth... When you dogpile all your network services into one device, like they do for a wifi router (which is a router, firewall, switch, access point, DHCP server, and frequently DNS relay), it tends to negatively affect its ability to do any of those things well.