Update 21st February 2020:
I’ve now had Google Nest support confirm that 5ghz Channel 149 and higher isn’t supported – which to me is baffling that a device can be released in this state.
Original Post:
I received a Google Nest Mini as part of Google’s promotion to subscribers of YouTube Premium. A nice gesture, and I hadn’t actually jumpted into having a smart speaker at home myself. Beyond wondering what use I could actually get from it – it was free, so I ordered.
A few weeks later it arrived, and setup should have been simple. Power it on, get the Google Home app on a mobile device, and follow the bouncing ball to set up. I’d done this before for a Chromecast I have, which I could see in the Home setup and have connected to the home 5Ghz network – no issues there at all.
However, when going through the same setup for the Google Nest Mini, I couldn’t even see my 5Ghz home Wi-Fi network listed on my phone. Weird, I tried several things including adding the details of the network in manually. Nothing I tried would work. I also couldn’t get it connected to my 2.4Ghz home network, unless I picked my guest network. I’d had the same issue on a printer that wouldn’t connect and only supported 2.4Ghz; the cuplrit was the AiMesh ASUS setup I had (side note – I personally would recommend to avoid ASUS AiMesh as there’s multiple problems I experienced, it’s not user friendly and solutions that are half done in it such as menu options that display but aren’t supported, as I eventually had confirmed by ASUS support. That’s not to say you should avoid all ASUS solutions.).
That really wasn’t where I wanted to end up though – the Nest Mini streaming data from my 2.4Ghz non-meshed guest network. After a bunch of Googling on the issue, I saw a comment somewhere that said to try band 36. As a refresher on this – 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi has bands or channels from 1 to 11 – but there’s overlap between the bands and they interfere with each other, so you really only wan to use 1, 6 or 11. 5Ghz however, has many more. My 5Ghz network at home was set to ‘Auto’ – which should pick the least noisiest band. That resulted in band 149.
I changed my band from 149 to 36 – the lowest option available, and went through the Google Nest Mini setup yet again. This time, I could see my network! It went through the entire setup process seamlessly. For my own sanity, I tried jumping up to a band 165, higher than 149, reset the Mini, and tried setting it up again but without success. Jumped to band 44 this time, and again it worked perfectly.
It seemed the lower channels were fine – from 36 to 48, but the higher bands the device just couldn’t see. Again, weirdly the Chromecast would successfully set up on any of these and was a much older device than my brand new Nest Mini.
I also know it’s not just me that has this problem, as @AjTechs also confirmed he had the same experience – no 5Ghz network visible on band 149, but was visible when he used band 44.
I tweeted about it of course because that’s what I do. The first fail was the frustrating plug design, that wouldn’t fit with any other standard plug I had next to it. It’s also not a USB charger, but a round connector of some sort.
@GoogleNest swooped in to attempt to save the day. They couldn’t answer that question, and after 1 1/2 hours of back and forth over DM, they really didn’t know what was going on still. They still couldn’t answer my original question, and didn’t get me any closer to proving the problem was any different to what I’d found myself.
If I get any more details I’ll update this post – but otherwise, if you’re having the same problem as me, then try a different band, and when that works, have fun reconnecting everything in your house back to Wi-Fi again :)