If you want to connect to a Wireless network that has both 5GHz and 2.4GHz frequency bands enabled and they use the same SSID, you can set your Apple Mac to connect to only a particular WIFI band easily.
How to scan for the same SSID channels using macOS Wireless Diagnostics
1. Open Wireless Diagnostics.app in /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications or you can search for it in spotlight.
2. Go to Window -> Scan.
3. Find your Wireless Network Names (with same SSID) and their different channels. In our example below, our 2.4GHz Wireless SSID is on channel 4 and our 5GHz Wireless SSID is on channel 153. Upon checking our router, we have channel 153 hard-set for our 5GHz band, so this looks good.
How to scan for the same SSID channels using macOS Terminal
1. Open Terminal.app in /USER/Applications/Utilities or you can search for it in spotlight.
2. Type the following command in Terminal to search for Wireless Networks (required administrator privileges):
sudo /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport /usr/sbin/airport -s
3. Find your Wireless Network Names (with same SSID) and their different channels. In our example below, our 2.4GHz Wireless SSID is on channel 4 and our 5GHz Wireless SSID is on channel 153. Upon checking our router, we have channel 153 hard-set for our 5GHz band, so this looks good.
Force Mac to connect to 5GHz Wireless Network Band
Now that we identified the channel our 5GHz band is in, we will set our MacBook to connect to only the 5GHz band, so it does not ever connect to the lesser bandwidth band 2.4GHz our router has enabled.
1. Disable WIFI on your Apple Mac.
2. Open Terminal.app in /USER/Applications/Utilities or you can search for it in spotlight.
3. Type the following command in Terminal to force connect to your 5GHz band (required administrator privileges):
sudo /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Resources/airport --channel=NUMBER
Where NUMBER is the channel ID of your 5GHz network band.
4. Reconnect to WIFI.
5. Ensure you are connected to the 5GHz band. The easiest way to do this is alt-click your WIFI icon in the menu bar to reveal your Apple Mac’s wireless connection details:
