How do I find out if my wireless card supports 5 GHz?
Find out the interface name, by running iwconfig
$ iwconfig
eth0 no wireless extensions.
lo no wireless extensions.
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"EvanCarroll"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: D8:50:E6:44:B2:C8
Bit Rate=19.5 Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=61/70 Signal level=-49 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:1 Invalid misc:80 Missed beacon:0
In this case it is wlan0
, then run iwlist <interface> freq
,
$ iwlist wlan0 freq
wlan0 13 channels in total; available frequencies :
Channel 01 : 2.412 GHz
Channel 02 : 2.417 GHz
Channel 03 : 2.422 GHz
Channel 04 : 2.427 GHz
Channel 05 : 2.432 GHz
Channel 06 : 2.437 GHz
Channel 07 : 2.442 GHz
Channel 08 : 2.447 GHz
Channel 09 : 2.452 GHz
Channel 10 : 2.457 GHz
Channel 11 : 2.462 GHz
Channel 12 : 2.467 GHz
Channel 13 : 2.472 GHz
Current Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6)
None of these channels are outside of 2.4 GHz. It does not support 5 GHz.
If you're trying to discover what your card supports, iw phy
is a nice solution with a lot more information (including supported bands).
iwlist
is showing more what's available and/or allowed in your locale, what was disabled due to DFS channels, etc., not what your device supports. From the iwlist
man page:
freq[uency]/channel Give the list of available frequencies in the device and the number of defined channels. Please note that usually the driver returns the total number of channels and only the frequencies available in the present locale, so there is no one-to-one mapping between frequencies displayed and channel numbers.