Very true. Fortunately I live next to a park and on an intersection of a street, so I only see the tenant below me's wi-fi which is only on 2.4Ghz, the router is on "auto" for channel so I'm assuming it's picking the least congested one. As for 5Ghz, hardly anyone near me has it, so I take full advantage of channel 161. Both bands where I live are pretty wide open.
I should also note my wi-fi AP is in the opposite room. The signal is cross a room, going through a wall and a couch to get to the AP. Very little signal loss. I suspect the overall range of 5Ghz is more limited as higher frequency waves tend to attenuate faster than lower frequency waves.
On a side note: My gateway was acting up yesterday. Today I diagnosed it down to my trusty Radeon HD 2600 XT failing.
One of the few GDDR4 video cards to ever make it to production... I threw the GeForce 8600 GTS I got from Norton in a crunching rig a while back into it instead, not like it's doing anything with video being a gateway.