We’re going to spend this blog post on the most frequently asked questions on any message board dealing with Quest streaming (regardless of what solution is actually used): “Why is my Wifi not working?”, “Why is the connection horrible?”, “What hotspot should I get?” “I did everything right but it laaaaags?!?!”

Getting your hotspot to work is not rocket science, but it can be confusing for people unfamiliar with the technology. So here we will lead by example and break everything down into very simple terms. If you have any remaining questions, feel free to leave a comment.

How it should be

Your gaming PC is connected to your hotspot using an Ethernet cable. Your quest is connected to the same hotspot using 5Ghz wifi. If everything is set up as seen above, you will not experience issues with the Wifi. If something doesn’t work, it will either be one of the examples we list below or an unrelated issue on your PC.

Issue #1: No Wired Connection

This is by far the most common problem. In addition to connecting the quest to the hotspot via Wifi, the gaming PC is also connected via Wifi. This may seem like a good idea at first, but it will decimate your performance. For one, Wifi has much more lag than wired Ethernet. For another, Wifi divides it’s bandwidth between all devices. Ideally, 2 devices connected to the same hotspot would both get 50% of the bandwidth but in reality 2 devices usually push the bandwidth to around 30%. Get a cable. They cost $3. This is not optional.

Issue #2: 2.4 Ghz Connection

The second most common issue is having the quest connect to a 2.4 Ghz wifi network. The wifi standard (802.11) has a lot of sub-standards that were added during the years ( 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, 802.11ac, …). The earlier ones of these standards all operated in the 2.4 Ghz band (except for 802.11a which used an even lower frequency band, but I digress). Even modern standards like 802.11n and 802.11ac support transmitting on 2.4 Ghz both for backwards compatibility and because lower frequencies travel further.

However, 5 Ghz can transmit a lot more data than 2.4 Ghz. When just browsing the web, this hardly matters but when streaming in real time, it makes a huge difference. Streaming at 2.4 Ghz is not playable. Period.

Any Wifi hotspot sold in the last 5 years or so (and many earlier ones) support transmitting in 5 Ghz. On some, the process is automatic, on some it is optional and on some a separate network is created for 5 Ghz. Check the spec sheet of your hotspot to see if 5 Ghz are supported and check the documentation to see how to enable it.

Issue #3: Intereference

A less common but still significant issue is having the quest too far away from the Wifi hotspot. A lot of electrical devices will interfere with the Wifi signal. So will walls or pipes. The quest will still be able to connect to the hotspot but it won’t have enough bandwidth to stream well. As a general rule of thumb, if you have wooden walls, you can usually be one wall away. With stone walls or radio emitting electronics, there should be none between you and the hotspot while streaming.

(And for the techies reading this and going Ha! But the Microwave works at 2.4 Ghz and you just told them to only use 5 Ghz, n00b! read up on RTS, frequency doubling and how wide channels are determined. 💛)

Issue #4: Too many other devices

The last issue we will discuss is quite common but seldom noticed. As we said before in the part on connecting your gaming PC via Ethernet, each device that uses the same Wifi will reduce the bandwidth available quite drastically. Having too many other devices (phones, PCs, laptops, tablets, home automation, roombas, …) on the same wifi can lead to extremely bad connectivity. Unlike your gaming PC those devices won’t be constantly transmitting data, so the impact will be more unexpected.

The same can happen if you (or your neighbors) have too many hotspots on the same frequency band. Modern hardware usually determines the ideal frequency to use automatically to ensure that your connection is clear, but it can still be a good idea to scan surrounding networks and choose a channel that is free.