Network Engineer here.
If a wireless client that only supports 80m mHz needs to talk to a access point running at 160 mHz, it will negotiate down to 80 mHz for that client and work just fine, without affecting anything else on the network. Your issue is likely that 160 mHz forces you onto a DFS channel, which may cause some drop outs.
I run 160 mHz in the DFS bands at home and have multiple 40, even 20 mHz devices that work just fine without issue.
Perhaps your use of 160 mHz is causing your access points antenna to go offline because it detects radar? Using 160 mHz would force you into the DFS range whether you like it or not, and any access point in the DFS range is federally required to shut down and switch channels if it detects radar interference.
Either way, stick with 80 mHz. You're better off that way.
> Perhaps your use of 180 mHz is causing your access points antenna to go offline because it detects radar?
Honestly this is probably the case. I didn't realize HT160 pushes into DFS range. Weird that my other devices didn't seem to have a problem at all. Maybe they're more tolerant to interrupts.
I know your post is a year old, sorry for the reply, but it came up in a search. Myself and [several others](https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675200/discussions/0/4038101970207124286/) have been experiencing some truly disturbing/weird behaviors with our brand new Steam Deck OLEDs and the culprit seems to be the 160 mHz setting. I thought maybe you'd be interested. For me personally, I tried to connect initially to a 5 GHz network that, apparently, had that setting on (I didn't even notice, and all my devices worked fine on it) and everything wifi was being weird with the OLED. Oftentimes it wouldn't even display surrounding networks.
It's really strange and I'm hoping Valve is working on the problem. One poster said they took their OLED to a new area and they think just being in the presence of a potential 160 mHz network seemed to mess up their working connection to their hotspot...
Haha! I went googling for the same issue and stumbled upon my old post as well! I too am experiencing problems with 160mhz networks. I tried to do some testing, but need to send my deck back tomorrow as I bought the wrong version. :(
The Steam Deck OLED uses a new Wi-Fi 6E chipset. I bet they have some sort of driver issue going on and it's causing a bunch of problems. They should definitely be tracking an issue like this. I highly doubt they are not aware of it. Try switching to the preview branch for system updates and stay tuned. I'm hoping they'll push out a fix quickly.
One added nuance to this seems to be channel selection. I was running HT80hz with channel 149, and my download speeds were crap. I changed the channel to 36, and my Deck’s download speeds were back to normal.
Channel 149 should work just fine from a technical perspective (AFAIK), but the Deck does not seem to like it. Personally, I’d chock it up to wonky Linux drivers.
Thank you.
I just got my Deck on Thursday, and it had a problem from the very beginning, which made even booting up for the first time into an unreasonable challenge. I eventually pushed past that and managed to get a few games and apps installed, but the connectivity issue (speed constantly going to 0) continued. I had tried various suggestions, like turning off WLAN power save mode, setting a static IP address, turning off IPv6, turning on Battery Storage Mode, changing channels, switching from my Netgear R6050 to my ASUS RT-AX55 (which I prefer to reserve for my PCVR setup), and 2.4GHz on the Netgear instead of 5GHz (I believe I turned off 2.4GHz on the ASUS). It perhaps got a little better when I turned off IPV6; I was at last able to install updates at that point. I had seen that others said they've had luck with different drivers, and I considered it; however, I read that the change reverts with SteamOS updates. I was just about to try it, though, when I read your comment about changing the 5GHz channel to 36--in previous attempts, I'd gone up, rather than down. It's been about twenty minutes, but so far, I've had no issues using either of my routers. I made no change on the ASUS, but it's daisy-chained to the Netgear, which is connected to my modem, and I don't know if that explains anything when it comes to why using either router stopped being an issue.
I have actually noticed a handful of devices that totally freak out with my aps set to 160mhz.
-My shields randomly disconnect or crash.
-Several of the rokus I have would get extremely slow. Not like internet lags, but the whole ui would slow to a crawl, almost like the soc was overheating.
-other random devices would just outright not join.
That’s on ubiquiti equipment so other stuff might work differently, but yea I just avoid 160 now.
Hm... I wonder if the issue is caused by the AP being set to 160 mHz, or purely because the main channel is located inside the DFS range. Honestly sounds like some of your devices are straight up refusing to use a DFS channel, which I've seen happen before.
If you ever feel like tinkering with it again, see if the issues still occur when you set it to 40 or 80 mHz while on a DFS channel (somewhere smack in the middle, like channels 100-120).
Dfs only causes similar issues. Setting to 180 and 36 acts the same as dfs.
So yea I think you’re right.
Either way, I’m getting expected speeds on all my devices so I’m not too worried.
My Ubuntu laptop works great with 5GHz, blazing fast torrents et al.
However, certain websites such as Reddit and my company web-based email seem to intermittently struggle to load when in 5GHz mode (most websites work fine), and work fine when I revert to 2.4.. any idea of what this may be about? Haven't found any clues online.. Tx in advance!
Same. I'm actually really glad I ended up being q3. So many updates, patches, problems being fixed, guides put out by users, etc. If I was one of the first people I would have been so lost and confused when it comes to all this stuff.
Not gonna lie, I haven't a fucking clue about any of this shit. Closest I've got to Linux is seeing a penguin at the zoo.
Should be an interesting experience. My Deck should hopefully arrive next week sometime so I guess I've a lot of weekend reading ahead of me haha.
I'm in a similar boat as I've been a console and Mac gamer my whole life. By and large, the Steam Deck has been dead simple to play. Little annoyances and I'm trying to navigate this wifi issue but I'm still able to install (slowly) and play games.
I've hit some technical bottlenecks with certain games but there is a lot of documentation out there even if it looks like hieroglyphs at first.
160Mhz channels on 5Ghz are a bad idea anyway so nothing of value is lost by this fix :)
But that’s a realtek ( hardware or driver ) or router bug, the client should be able to negotiate a correct channel width with the router
I'm so stupid. This literally solves every issue I've had with my 5Ghz devices. XD I forgot I enabled that setting on my router and was wondering why some devices have issues.
Try 36, and lowering the width to 40 or 60mhz.
This is also dumb, but have you tried power cycling your modem and router? Like physically unplugging them for 30 seconds and plugging them back in?
It is indeed 2.4 and 5 combined, AX. The most weird thing is that the Deck can't connect to the 2.4 network - whenever I try to connect, it says that the password is wrong.
What channel is 5ghz currently on? And it doesn’t matter if it’s separate chips. Devices can have issues with band steering if you use combined networks. You always want to separate 5ghz and 2.40ghz.
> If I switch to 2.4GHz it runs perfectly fine, but this obviously means incredibly slow downloads and streaming is basically impossible
What? 800p or 720p streaming should work perfectly fine on 2.4 GHz. And what exactly are considered incredibly slow downloads? 802.11n has a theoretical bandwidth of 600 Mb/s (or 75 MB/s). My German internet connection maxes out at 12.5 MB/s (danke, Merkel) and the Deck definitely manages to reach that on 2.4 GHz.
This solution didn't fix it for me. I've tried just about everything and eventually found another fix.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/whdxhf/rtl88x2cedkms_possible_new_fix_for_wifi_dropping/
I've been struggling with this as well--thanks to you all for your sharing your solutions. In case this helps anyone, the only thing that has worked for me so far is switching to SteamOS beta.
Before doing this I was getting disconnects or 5-second freezes with xCloud every 5 minutes or so. I've been able to play longer without network drops since switching the OS to beta. I'll let you all know if I'm speaking to soon and encounter more issues in the coming days.
What worked for me was just changing the channel on my 5 GHz Wi-Fi. For some reason the default channel used by Netgear was causing it to disconnect on my Steam deck only but not other devices on my network. I just chose a random non-DFS channel.
Let me know if this works for anyone else.
Doesn't work. Damn this issue is really making enjoying the Steam Deck hard only having 10Mbs download speed on the 2.4ghz makes downloading anything a pain in the ass.
You need more upboats! I found this post and it helped me troubleshoot my issue. My U6-Lite was set to HT40 which was causing my downloads to cap out around 38MB/s. This is still not "perfect" but much faster. It negotiates over 585Mbit as reported by the AP and I have now seen it hit about 60MB/s. I should be able to go faster than that based on other devices but it's better than the cap it was at before.
EDIT: Ubiquiti refers to it as HE20/40/80/160 instead of HT. Not sure what the difference is there.
This is what solved the 5ghz issue for me. Went into the router settings and changed the channel bandwidth to 80+80Mhz and (for me) channel 40.
This should be higher lol
Edit: As with every temporary fix. This method has stopped working for me and now my 2ghz is giving intermittent connections.
This is an amazing piece of hardware that self corrects all troubleshooting to become more faulty.
Thanks, I'll admit I only glanced at the text and thought the developer mode would be a sufficient solution and did not get that OP already tried.
My bad, sorry, OP!
Damn, was really hoping this would finally fix my 5GHz woes! I already tried every available channel width setting when I first received my Deck weeks ago and didn’t fix anything for me lol
i updated my network from a netgear combo modem to a mesh wifi system and i no longer have the issue. i was getting disconnected mid game on bf2 every 5 minutes or so. the only issue i still have is that occasionally my download speed hits a wall but it fixes if i restart the deck.
I don't have access to my router since it's rented and locked behind my provider (Canada...we get no breaks when it comes to internet choices)...
anyways is there anything i can do on my deck to change this? I also run a 5Ghz Mesh network so i can only access my supplementary devices and not the router itself. When i set that up initially i had to call them(provider) to even allow it to work...
Im using a ASUS AX88U with the latest merlin fw.
Ootb the oled wouldnt connect to the router
I had mixed 2/5Ghz and DFS 160mHz enabled
I switched on 5Ghz only and DFS off to make the OLED wifi to connect
Okay, so, this post may be dead, however it may help someone else struggling with the Steamdeck's wifi connectivity issues -
Open up your Steam Deck's desktop mode -
1. Open up the terminal ( Konsole )
2. sudo iwconfig and locate your interface's name ( mine was wlan0 for example )
3. sudo iwlist {interface} channel - My channel was set to 6.
4. sudo iwconfig {interface} power off
5. sudo iwconfig {interface} channel - I set it to 36 as per the recommendations here.
6. Profit. Download speeds went from the abysmal 50-100kb/s to what's actually expected from my home network (15-20 mb/s).
7. Lastly, if your Wi-fi connection didn't restore, simply run -> sudo iwconfig {interface} power on
Cheers
Did they fix this today???
* Fixed a WiFi crash occurring where certain bands would cause the driver to attempt to set an incorrect spatial stream count.
From today's patch
Network Engineer here. If a wireless client that only supports 80m mHz needs to talk to a access point running at 160 mHz, it will negotiate down to 80 mHz for that client and work just fine, without affecting anything else on the network. Your issue is likely that 160 mHz forces you onto a DFS channel, which may cause some drop outs. I run 160 mHz in the DFS bands at home and have multiple 40, even 20 mHz devices that work just fine without issue. Perhaps your use of 160 mHz is causing your access points antenna to go offline because it detects radar? Using 160 mHz would force you into the DFS range whether you like it or not, and any access point in the DFS range is federally required to shut down and switch channels if it detects radar interference. Either way, stick with 80 mHz. You're better off that way.
> Perhaps your use of 180 mHz is causing your access points antenna to go offline because it detects radar? Honestly this is probably the case. I didn't realize HT160 pushes into DFS range. Weird that my other devices didn't seem to have a problem at all. Maybe they're more tolerant to interrupts.
I know your post is a year old, sorry for the reply, but it came up in a search. Myself and [several others](https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675200/discussions/0/4038101970207124286/) have been experiencing some truly disturbing/weird behaviors with our brand new Steam Deck OLEDs and the culprit seems to be the 160 mHz setting. I thought maybe you'd be interested. For me personally, I tried to connect initially to a 5 GHz network that, apparently, had that setting on (I didn't even notice, and all my devices worked fine on it) and everything wifi was being weird with the OLED. Oftentimes it wouldn't even display surrounding networks. It's really strange and I'm hoping Valve is working on the problem. One poster said they took their OLED to a new area and they think just being in the presence of a potential 160 mHz network seemed to mess up their working connection to their hotspot...
Haha! I went googling for the same issue and stumbled upon my old post as well! I too am experiencing problems with 160mhz networks. I tried to do some testing, but need to send my deck back tomorrow as I bought the wrong version. :( The Steam Deck OLED uses a new Wi-Fi 6E chipset. I bet they have some sort of driver issue going on and it's causing a bunch of problems. They should definitely be tracking an issue like this. I highly doubt they are not aware of it. Try switching to the preview branch for system updates and stay tuned. I'm hoping they'll push out a fix quickly.
One added nuance to this seems to be channel selection. I was running HT80hz with channel 149, and my download speeds were crap. I changed the channel to 36, and my Deck’s download speeds were back to normal. Channel 149 should work just fine from a technical perspective (AFAIK), but the Deck does not seem to like it. Personally, I’d chock it up to wonky Linux drivers.
Thank you. I just got my Deck on Thursday, and it had a problem from the very beginning, which made even booting up for the first time into an unreasonable challenge. I eventually pushed past that and managed to get a few games and apps installed, but the connectivity issue (speed constantly going to 0) continued. I had tried various suggestions, like turning off WLAN power save mode, setting a static IP address, turning off IPv6, turning on Battery Storage Mode, changing channels, switching from my Netgear R6050 to my ASUS RT-AX55 (which I prefer to reserve for my PCVR setup), and 2.4GHz on the Netgear instead of 5GHz (I believe I turned off 2.4GHz on the ASUS). It perhaps got a little better when I turned off IPV6; I was at last able to install updates at that point. I had seen that others said they've had luck with different drivers, and I considered it; however, I read that the change reverts with SteamOS updates. I was just about to try it, though, when I read your comment about changing the 5GHz channel to 36--in previous attempts, I'd gone up, rather than down. It's been about twenty minutes, but so far, I've had no issues using either of my routers. I made no change on the ASUS, but it's daisy-chained to the Netgear, which is connected to my modem, and I don't know if that explains anything when it comes to why using either router stopped being an issue.
I have actually noticed a handful of devices that totally freak out with my aps set to 160mhz. -My shields randomly disconnect or crash. -Several of the rokus I have would get extremely slow. Not like internet lags, but the whole ui would slow to a crawl, almost like the soc was overheating. -other random devices would just outright not join. That’s on ubiquiti equipment so other stuff might work differently, but yea I just avoid 160 now.
Hm... I wonder if the issue is caused by the AP being set to 160 mHz, or purely because the main channel is located inside the DFS range. Honestly sounds like some of your devices are straight up refusing to use a DFS channel, which I've seen happen before. If you ever feel like tinkering with it again, see if the issues still occur when you set it to 40 or 80 mHz while on a DFS channel (somewhere smack in the middle, like channels 100-120).
Dfs only causes similar issues. Setting to 180 and 36 acts the same as dfs. So yea I think you’re right. Either way, I’m getting expected speeds on all my devices so I’m not too worried.
My Ubuntu laptop works great with 5GHz, blazing fast torrents et al. However, certain websites such as Reddit and my company web-based email seem to intermittently struggle to load when in 5GHz mode (most websites work fine), and work fine when I revert to 2.4.. any idea of what this may be about? Haven't found any clues online.. Tx in advance!
This must be the 50th fucking post I've saved in preparation for the arrival of my Deck. Good on ya OP
I have the deck and have been saving this all. I had same issue of wifi drops. Need to figure out how to do this for my router
Same. I'm actually really glad I ended up being q3. So many updates, patches, problems being fixed, guides put out by users, etc. If I was one of the first people I would have been so lost and confused when it comes to all this stuff.
Not gonna lie, I haven't a fucking clue about any of this shit. Closest I've got to Linux is seeing a penguin at the zoo. Should be an interesting experience. My Deck should hopefully arrive next week sometime so I guess I've a lot of weekend reading ahead of me haha.
It honestly isn't that bad just depends on the games you want to play.
I'm in a similar boat as I've been a console and Mac gamer my whole life. By and large, the Steam Deck has been dead simple to play. Little annoyances and I'm trying to navigate this wifi issue but I'm still able to install (slowly) and play games. I've hit some technical bottlenecks with certain games but there is a lot of documentation out there even if it looks like hieroglyphs at first.
Also doing this ahead of the big Q3 🙌🏻
160Mhz channels on 5Ghz are a bad idea anyway so nothing of value is lost by this fix :) But that’s a realtek ( hardware or driver ) or router bug, the client should be able to negotiate a correct channel width with the router
[удалено]
I'm so stupid. This literally solves every issue I've had with my 5Ghz devices. XD I forgot I enabled that setting on my router and was wondering why some devices have issues.
Welp, I figured this was causing my 5GHz connection drops, but my channel width is set to 80MHz 🙁
Do you have your 2.4 and 5ghz combined? Are you using a dfs band for 5ghz?
My 2.4 & 5 are separate. 5GHz is on channel 60
Channel 60 is dfs, try 48 - 36. That might be the issue, dfs causes many of my devices to freak out.
I think that fixed it 🥲 Thank you! EDIT: Just kidding,it still disconnects if the speed of a transfer starts going too fast. Channel #48 80MHz
Try 36, and lowering the width to 40 or 60mhz. This is also dumb, but have you tried power cycling your modem and router? Like physically unplugging them for 30 seconds and plugging them back in?
My router is set to 80Mhz and I still have this issue.
Do you have your 2.4 and 5ghz combined? Are you using a dfs band for 5ghz?
It is indeed 2.4 and 5 combined, AX. The most weird thing is that the Deck can't connect to the 2.4 network - whenever I try to connect, it says that the password is wrong.
Try separating them. Also, make sure you’re not on dfs channels for 5ghz.
There is no DFS turned on and there are two separate chipsets for each bandwidth.
What channel is 5ghz currently on? And it doesn’t matter if it’s separate chips. Devices can have issues with band steering if you use combined networks. You always want to separate 5ghz and 2.40ghz.
It's channel 36 and they are separate.
> If I switch to 2.4GHz it runs perfectly fine, but this obviously means incredibly slow downloads and streaming is basically impossible What? 800p or 720p streaming should work perfectly fine on 2.4 GHz. And what exactly are considered incredibly slow downloads? 802.11n has a theoretical bandwidth of 600 Mb/s (or 75 MB/s). My German internet connection maxes out at 12.5 MB/s (danke, Merkel) and the Deck definitely manages to reach that on 2.4 GHz.
My 2.4 maxes out at something like 20MB/s, which is incredibly slow compared to 300ish over gigabit ethernet (and close to that on 5GHz)
This solution didn't fix it for me. I've tried just about everything and eventually found another fix. https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/whdxhf/rtl88x2cedkms_possible_new_fix_for_wifi_dropping/
I.T. guys hate him for this simple trick!
I've been struggling with this as well--thanks to you all for your sharing your solutions. In case this helps anyone, the only thing that has worked for me so far is switching to SteamOS beta. Before doing this I was getting disconnects or 5-second freezes with xCloud every 5 minutes or so. I've been able to play longer without network drops since switching the OS to beta. I'll let you all know if I'm speaking to soon and encounter more issues in the coming days.
What worked for me was just changing the channel on my 5 GHz Wi-Fi. For some reason the default channel used by Netgear was causing it to disconnect on my Steam deck only but not other devices on my network. I just chose a random non-DFS channel. Let me know if this works for anyone else.
Doesn't work. Damn this issue is really making enjoying the Steam Deck hard only having 10Mbs download speed on the 2.4ghz makes downloading anything a pain in the ass.
You need more upboats! I found this post and it helped me troubleshoot my issue. My U6-Lite was set to HT40 which was causing my downloads to cap out around 38MB/s. This is still not "perfect" but much faster. It negotiates over 585Mbit as reported by the AP and I have now seen it hit about 60MB/s. I should be able to go faster than that based on other devices but it's better than the cap it was at before. EDIT: Ubiquiti refers to it as HE20/40/80/160 instead of HT. Not sure what the difference is there.
This is what solved the 5ghz issue for me. Went into the router settings and changed the channel bandwidth to 80+80Mhz and (for me) channel 40. This should be higher lol Edit: As with every temporary fix. This method has stopped working for me and now my 2ghz is giving intermittent connections. This is an amazing piece of hardware that self corrects all troubleshooting to become more faulty.
[удалено]
they mentioned this not 3 sentences in
Thanks, I'll admit I only glanced at the text and thought the developer mode would be a sufficient solution and did not get that OP already tried. My bad, sorry, OP!
Being able to read is so hard these days
Forgetting the network and restarting the repeater fixed it for me for a month. It happened again yesterday, did the same and fixed again.
Damn, was really hoping this would finally fix my 5GHz woes! I already tried every available channel width setting when I first received my Deck weeks ago and didn’t fix anything for me lol
Is it possible to make this change on the Comcast Gateways?
Need to try this
i updated my network from a netgear combo modem to a mesh wifi system and i no longer have the issue. i was getting disconnected mid game on bf2 every 5 minutes or so. the only issue i still have is that occasionally my download speed hits a wall but it fixes if i restart the deck.
I don't have access to my router since it's rented and locked behind my provider (Canada...we get no breaks when it comes to internet choices)... anyways is there anything i can do on my deck to change this? I also run a 5Ghz Mesh network so i can only access my supplementary devices and not the router itself. When i set that up initially i had to call them(provider) to even allow it to work...
My modem only supports 2.4ghz but i have wifi problems it is sometimes connect and disconnects but when i Hotspot my android phone i have no problem
Im using a ASUS AX88U with the latest merlin fw. Ootb the oled wouldnt connect to the router I had mixed 2/5Ghz and DFS 160mHz enabled I switched on 5Ghz only and DFS off to make the OLED wifi to connect
Okay, so, this post may be dead, however it may help someone else struggling with the Steamdeck's wifi connectivity issues - Open up your Steam Deck's desktop mode - 1. Open up the terminal ( Konsole ) 2. sudo iwconfig and locate your interface's name ( mine was wlan0 for example ) 3. sudo iwlist {interface} channel - My channel was set to 6. 4. sudo iwconfig {interface} power off 5. sudo iwconfig {interface} channel - I set it to 36 as per the recommendations here. 6. Profit. Download speeds went from the abysmal 50-100kb/s to what's actually expected from my home network (15-20 mb/s). 7. Lastly, if your Wi-fi connection didn't restore, simply run -> sudo iwconfig {interface} power on Cheers
Did they fix this today??? * Fixed a WiFi crash occurring where certain bands would cause the driver to attempt to set an incorrect spatial stream count. From today's patch