Airport Extreme 5Ghz vs. Regular Network

[ldichiara11]

Good Afternoon all -
I recently purchased an Airport Extreme which I am tremendously happy with - and is working as expected; I do have a question regarding connection strength and data transfer which is puzzling me a bit.

I have several devices connecting to my network:
2 iPhones
2 iPads
1 MacBook Pro
1 HP Machine running Windows XP

As part of my Extreme set up - I have specifically created a 5Ghz network. As I understand it (I may be wrong here) - I need to specifically connect the the 5Ghz network. I can do this no problem. The strange this is that when I have my devices connected to the 5Ghz network it says my connection strength is AVERAGE - if I switch the over to the regular network it immediately goes to 'EXCELLENT' - shouldn't this be the other way around? I know certain devices can't take advantage of the 5Ghz - but I am talking about iPhone 4S models and 1st Generation Ipads.

Thank you -

 

[SGilbert]

I've got a Netgear router with both also. I connect with the 5GHz fine, but get occasional dropouts on it with my early 08 MBP. Wife gets excellent connections with her mid 09 MBP.

I figure that 5G isn't compatible very well with older machines, and I just use 2.4GHz.

 

[DeltaMac]

It's also about physics.
Higher frequency, shorter transmission distance.
Fewer folks use the 5GHz band, so there should be less problems with signal interference, but the overall signal range will be somewhat less than the 2.4 GHz.