there's a huge number of 802.11b and 802.11g devices that simply won't operate at all on a 2.4 GHz radio of a 802.11n/11ac/11ax network that is set to "dual 40/20MHz" channel mode. And definitely not on a 40 MHz channel. Remember that in older wifi systems there was no such thing as a 40 MHz channel.

same thing for old 802.11a 5 GHz band devices, they don't understand anything other than a fixed 20 MHz channel.

And that's before you run into problems with modern usage of WPA2.

Got there and tried to connect my laptop to their wifi network. No dice. My laptop (2014-15 era) doesn't do 5ghz and they had no 2.4ghz access points. Ended up having to use a cellular wifi hotspot they had lying around to get anything to work.

Another way of using it on Android, is to use USB tethering, while your mobile phone is connected to a Wi-Fi access point. That has worked pretty well for me, I sometimes even use that together with a computer to create a wired network from an access point. It could have worked in GP's case.

Yes, obviously I'm talking about carrier-locked phones (typically sold with contracts). A lot of (most?) never even unlock their phone, let alone jailbreak.

Of course it is easy to circumvent by changing TTL on the terhered device from 64 to 65 or something like that, but I guess the solution is esoteric enough that carriers still make money doing crap like this.

I didn't know this.

At the time I had a 2010-era dumb phone which I only got rid of because Verizon said they were turning off the towers for it at the beginning of this year.

Wow, that’s surprising…most laptops from like 2010 onwards have done 5 GHz. Did yours have a particularly old Wi-Fi card in it?

My late 2013 mbp has it and I discovered the other day that it can actually negotiate up to around 1 Gb/s.

On the other hand, I have an HP ProBook 430 G2 lying around the office. I don't know when it was bought, but it has an i5-4210U which according to intel was launched in Q2 2014. So the laptop must be from late 2014. It has a Realtek RTL8723BE PCIe wifi card which doesn't know about 5 GHz. It works acceptably well otherwise.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/2-in-1-laptops/inspiron-11-3...

TBH, in the future I'll preferentially opt for ~96 DPI when available. The 3200x1800 on my other system is completely overkill, and doesn't play particularly nice with a lot of websites or Steam.

The only place I run into trouble is if I try to do anything work-related on this laptop because our web design team designed our web app on large, high-density displays.

Every website I actually use at home works perfectly fine.

Actually it was only with 802.11ac (AKA WIFI5) that laptops started universally supporting 5GHz on the high and low end.

Before that you had to check the spec sheet.

In fact, it's still common for IoT devices to forgoe 5GHz, but it's becoming less common, thankfully.

From lspci:

03:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9565 / AR9565 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)

I don't know whether that is an old card or not. I think the laptop was in the $300-$400 range when we got it. Inspiron 15-3551, came with Ubuntu pre-installed, which has since been swapped out for Debian.

This Dell support link [1] seems to confirm that it is 2.4Ghz only.

[1] https://www.dell.com/community/Networking-Internet-Bluetooth...

From some quick research, one model is the IOGEAR GWU637. I've never used it, so that's not a recommendation or anything, just an example.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=199588

Just tape it to the case with a short USB cable. You can even set up a firewall on the thing so your ancient unpatched Mac isn't pulling its pants down and bending over for the modern Internet scan bots. You could even set up a transparent web proxy on the Pi so the ancient root certs on that version of OSX don't break everything.

Then all you have to worry about is the way out of date web browser not being able to handle all of the new web frameworks. Pretty soon you're asking yourself why you didn't go and find a just-as-cheap and much less outdated laptop instead.

It's a shame, because I'd love to use Tiger as a distraction-free environment. I'd even try and build a controller app for Tidal or Spotify so I could still have modern music streaming facilities. I spend a lot of time SSH'd into servers anyway so the lack of modern compatibility doesn't matter as long as a terminal's available.