It's called Band Steering and it messes up older devices. Its truely an L direction that the wifi industry has gone, its a reaction to overcrowding of the 2.4Ghz spectrum by automatically moving capable devices to the 5Ghz SSID
so happens that its not backwards compatible very well to 2.4Ghz only devices. Not because of the frequency itself but because of the band steering implementation from the router
Can you explain? Is the router not actually sending out the 2.4Ghz network, or sending it at too low power?