I mean the physical chip that is soldered to the Glowforge board. Think of this as an additional CPU dedicated to certain wireless frequency ranges. Cheaper chips or chips meant for low power IoT devices only have the functionality for limited frequencies. This may be done to save a few dollars or to reduce power consumption. A few dollars is a lot when IoT devices need to be in the $20 range and more circuitry means a higher power consumption which is worse for battery life.
This is the chip in my Glowforge, the one without Bluetooth: http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/wl1805mod.pdf
For some reason the chip they chose to use in the Glowforge only supports the 2.4 GHz range, this is odd because the monetary and power savings have no real benefit in with this type of machine. Band steering itself doesn’t do anything other than preventing dual-client chipsets, a physical chip that supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz, from using the 2.4GHz range. It does so by only accepting connection requests on the 5GHz channel and falls back to 2.4GHz. For devices that don’t know 5GHz exists, the Glowforge, there would be no impact.
fyi…a one-off observation is not scientific proof that an action has the effect you are perceiving…its most likely the placebo effect. You did something to your computer and now it “must” be functioning better. If you were tracking by the minute computer metrics and doing statistical comparisons with prior recorded numbers I would be more willing to believe you. This is what we do when testing new software features: A/B testing, blue/green testing, performance testing, etc.
As an aside, I challenge you to find a software engineer that would do anything a typical IT worker suggests. I bet it will be hard because they suggest the wide range of actions built up over the years many of which won’t actually fix any problems however in the rare case you are experiencing one of those rare issues all their bases will be covered.
Quick example, the help desk suggests rebooting your router. Rebooting a cheap router will likely solve the issue they frequently run out of memory to store routing tables and may incorrectly implement the standards, rebooting a high-end router will literally fix nothing.
But I don’t buy into the “move closer to the router” either–and I never have, and I was able to resolve my Offline issues with network channel change.
This will work in areas with high interference from other devices. In a typical suburban neighborhood, I would expect this to have little effect.
Oh, defragging…that is a myth to bust another day.