Force Raspberry Pi 4B 5 GHz WiFi

  • Hi Guys,

    I just experimented a little bit with my LE10 installation on a PI 4B with 2 GB RAM. I had issues that I was not able to skip chapters or fast forward in 1080p. I wondered what is the case and i ran into the 2.4 GHz bug that already is reported in for Pi 4B. Since I am not able to find the fixed Firmware I looked for another way. I have a FritzBox 7590 that is capable to deliver 2.4 and 5 GHz WiFi, but my Pi was using 2.4 everytime.

    I started to look around and found the following page: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/1078…s-point-problem

    With the mentioned solution I was able to find the 5 GHz Frequency of my WiFi. I continued to look for the settings file of connman/connmanctl and found this entry: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ConnMan#…_wpa_supplicant

    TL;DR:

    1. Open CLI to your PI running Libreelec 10.
    2. Check for frequency of WiFi with command: iw wlan0 scan | grep -A5 'freq: 5'
    3. Note the 4-Digit frequency of your WiFi
    4. Navigate to ~/.cache/connman/wifi_<string that is individual for your installation>/ and open the settings file
    5. enter the 4-Digit frequency and save the file
    6. reboot your Pi and enjoy forced 5 GHz WiFi 8)

    But keep in mind: When your WiFi automatically scans for better/less used frequencies this might stop working.

  • I wondered what is the case and i ran into the 2.4 GHz bug

    The bug was fixed 3 years ago, LE10 already has the later firmware. As for 5GHz, it already will pick it automatically, not sure what the criteria is but it may be signal strength. In my case, it works fine out of the box:

    # iw wlan0 info |grep channel

    channel 149 (5745 MHz), width: 80 MHz, center1: 5775 MHz


    It's possible your problem is buffer cache related, but I guess if this solved it then great. 5GHz will be a bit less congested, but I doubt it will solve any bandwidth problems on the Pi4 if that is the cause of your original problem.