In case anyone’s having connectivity issues like I was, I thought I’d share what fixed it for me.
What was happening for me was that my download speed would grind to a halt, and I’d get a yellow exclamation mark on my signal strength indicator in the top right corner. I’m using an old TP-Link Archer C7 with OpenWrt.
I’ve seen people recommend disabling WiFi Power Management in developer tools, or changing 5Ghz channels on your router. Neither of those helped in my case. What fixed my issue was switching the 5Ghz channel width on my router from 80Mhz to 40Mhz. If changing channel width alone doesn’t fix the issue for you, try experimenting with different combinations of channel and channel width.
I had issues with my 2.4Ghz band until I turned off the automatic channel switching (i.e. channels 1 to 14) on my router. For some reason it was confusing the Steam Deck.
No device should get confused for that. Are you really sure its not the router getting confused and selecting an oversaturated channel?
I’m not sure - all I can say is that it wasn’t a problem on any other device I tried out. There seems to be an odd bug with the Deck on dual band routers but I have no idea what the root cause is.
In general 5ghz isn’t great for stability. Unless you’re in the same room and have a clear los to the router, then 5ghz waves can struggle to reach you.
As 5ghz waves are wider than 2.4 they are also less penetrative - they can struggle to get through walls, furniture and sometimes even people.
2.4ghz can support up to around 140mbps, so just using 2.4 is generally the better option for portability.
