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I'm currently in the market for a Tv streaming stick and I planned on purchasing the Chromecast but I just read that it only runs on 2.4 ghz while some of the others will run on either 2.4 or 5. I'd still like to get the Chromecast, but I have to find out if it will work before I purchase!!

I've already tried 2 methods, to no avail:

  1. I installed wifi radar, and there is a decent amount of information shown, but nowhere do I see whether it's running on 2.4 or 5 Ghz (maybe I'm missing something,or it's not plainly stated as ghz?).
  2. I also ran the iwlist, I got a message reading: wlan0 Interface doesn't support scanning.

I want to buy the streaming stick in 3 or 4 days, somebody help!

andrew.46
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Katherine
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2 Answers2

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The available wireless frequency will be determined by your router or, if you had configured your computer to provide a hot-spot by the capabilies of your inbuilt wireless card.

I am not aware of any card or router that will only be able to provide a 5 GHz signal - they all can do 2,4 GHz as well, mostly simultaneously or even in parallel so we can use both bands to increase bandwidth.

Information including frequency about the wireless you are currently connected to will be displayed by this terminal command:

iwconfig

Also see

andrew.46
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Takkat
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For people without iwconfig.

Figure out the frequency of your current wifi connection:

sudo wpa_cli status | awk '/freq=/ {gsub(/freq=/,""); print $1 "MHz"}'
#Output example: 5620MHz

Figure out if your card supports 5ghz:

lspci | grep '802.11...'
#Output example: 03:00.0 Network controller: MEDIATEK Corp. MT7922 802.11ax PCI Express Wireless Network Adapter

This will (assuming you have a pci wireless card, if you're using a usb one you can try using lsusb instead) highlight the IEEE 802.11 standard of your card which you can then look up, for instance I got 802.11ax, looking that up I get this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_6

Which gives me this information:

Wi-Fi 6, or IEEE 802.11ax, is an IEEE standard from the Wi-Fi Alliance, for wireless networks (WLANs). It operates in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands,[4] with an extended version, Wi-Fi 6E, that adds the 6 GHz band.

If your result is vague like mine (supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz and maybe 6GHz) you can also try looking up your model number.

The lspci command will also give you the model number, for instance mine is MEDIATEK Corp. MT7922, doing a web search for that tells me that it is in fact a Wi-Fi 6E card which tells me that I not only support 5ghz but also 6ghz.

Cestarian
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