This article explains how you can identify which wifi bands your TP-Link Decos are using, without using a WiFi Analyzer or other such tools. I’ll also explain why you might need this information – in my case it was about interference (because of course it was!)
And as usual, this article wouldn’t have even been needed, if Copilot didn’t try to misdirect me when I asked it the very same question, that is in the title of this post: How to identify which wifi band your Decos are using?
But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.
Background
A while ago I was trying to figure out why my Zigbee devices seemed to have such horrible range. Wifi interference was one of my theories, since Zigbee unfortunately operates in similar wavelength bands – and hence, 2.4 GHz wifi channels overlap with Zigbee channels pretty much along the whole band.
Yep, you read that right. They completely overlap.
You’ll often see an answer online that it’s just wifi channels 1, 6 and 11 overlapping with Zigbee’s channels 11-22, and to lesser extent, 23-25. Channel 26 is usually deemed safe.
But unfortunately, that’s a misunderstanding. Channels 1, 6 and 11 are mentioned as they’re non-overlapping – meaning they do not overlap one another. They do overlap channels 2-5 and 7-10, respectively. Channels 12-13 only overlap the channel 11, and channel 14 doesn’t really overlap anything.
Except that all of them overlap Zigbee channels! But it’s not hopeless – choosing low 2.4 GHz channels for your wifi device, and high channels for your Zigbee devices lets you avoid the worst of the interference.
But in order to do that, I’d first need to know, how to see or change the wifi channels my TP-Link Decos are using.
Problem
So I did what I normally do. I asked Copilot:
How to figure out which wifi channels my Deco mesh is using?And the answer:
To find out which Wi-Fi channels your Deco mesh is using, follow these steps:
1. Open the Deco App: Launch the Deco app on your smartphone or tablet.
2. Go to Wi-Fi Settings: Navigate to the Wi-Fi settings section within the app.
3. Select Wireless Network: Choose the 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless networks.
4. Check Channel Information: In the advanced settings, you should see the current channels being used by your Deco nodes.Fantastic! Copilot is, of course, hallucinating, and this answer is wrong.
Well – at least it doesn’t help me at all. My Deco app doesn’t show Channel Information in the Wireless Network settings. Not even on the “Advanced” tab.
Instead, this is the level of detail that Deco app let’s you get to:
Nice.
For reference, my devices are 3 x TP-LINK Deco XE75 Pro Tri-Band WiFi6E mesh-router + 1 x TP-Link Deco X50-outdoor AX3000 WiFi6 mesh-router.
So in short. unfortunately the Deco app doesn’t let you select the wifi channel. But at least there is a way to identify the one it’s using.
Then, to avoid Zigbee channels overlapping with wifi channels, I’ll need to set the Zigbee channels to something that Deco is avoiding.
Solution
Eh, I mean, it’s actually really simple.
- Open the Deco app
- Network Optimization
- Click “Scan”
- Expand “Wi-Fi Interference”
And you should see something like this:
… and there we go! It tells you, how good the channel it currently is using. I assume it’ll also show if it applied any changes, but who the hell knows, right?
I feel like it’s a pretty obvious missing feature if you can’t select the channel yourself, but I guess TP-Link thinks they’re smarter than their customers. And they could of course be right.
Parting words
I moved all of my Zigbee bridges to the highest possible channels.
Yes – bridges in plural. I have many, partially because their range seems to be so incredibly abysmal (less than 10 meters) indoors. Outdoors the range is great.
After painstaking re-pairing work, I noticed no difference. Range is still abysmal and some sensors simply randomly drop off every now and then.
Great success! 😁
He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.
This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.
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