5.8ghz Phones

[Sip]

I was recently asked by a friend whether he should spend money on the 5.8Ghz phones or save his money and buy a regular old 2.4Ghz phone. I figured I'd post my answer here as well in case anyone is interetsted.

 

The simple short answer is don't waste your money on the "frequency" alone. Look at other aspects of the phone and the features you like. I don't think 5.8Ghz will give you longer range. That part seems mostly like marketing hype to me. It may be a bit better indoors though but not that much.

 

Without going into the technicals sides, 5.8 is just using a different ISM band. There is one major benefit to it in that it is not as congested as the 2.4 Ghz band since it is so new. Most of the wireless WiFi (802.11) networks that people are using at their homes are running on the 2.4 Ghz band (like 802.11b) so there is a lot of traffic there. If you or your neighbors have 2.4Ghz phones and wireless routers and surfing the web at home then you'll have to share that bandwidth space.

 

With the 5.8, that gets cleaned up as not too many people are using it right now. But that's probably the only major benefit.

 

At home back in LA, my wireless connection would die everytime someone used our Panasonic 2.4Ghz phone. So I might have considered a 5.8GHz phone for there.

 

Actually the 2.4Ghz may have a better range (especially outdoors) than the 5.8. Also, keep in mind that a lot of these "5.8" phones do 5.8 in one way and are still only doing 2.4 from the handset to the phone to save battery power.

 

There are a lot of other details, but 5.8Ghz is not that "superior" to 2.4 for you to worry about other than this existing traffic issue. Especially since the phones sometimes cost twice as much as the comparable 2.4Ghz ones. Still, you probably don't want to use the microwave and the phone at the same time

[sev-mard]

Shat khelasti ek. Ed informationi hamar merci.

[gevo27]

call me a geek.. but dangit i have read into this myself.. LMAO..

 

and basically for pure "quality of sound" you can forget about the 5.8 vs. 2.4, its BS... Like you said Sip.. The main diff is the quality of the phone, which is directly related to company that manufacturess it which is directly related to price..

 

"tangits ejan@ cheka" very very very true...

 

and all the other techinical aspects as Sip explained. its all BLAH BLAH BLAH for the average user.. but again, if you have wireless networking of any type.. then you might need to worry about it.. lol.. most of these wirels\ess phones dont even work 10 feet out the front door.. so usually the neihbors conversations happen with unusual weather.. which very directly affects the radio wave durability..