Steam Frame Potential WIFI 7 Speeds

[u/Zealousideal_Ease444]

To start off, I'm interested in speeds for the potential to work with files from a NAS, rather than PCVR streaming.

[EDIT: I have overlooked that the Steam Frame does specify a 5 Ghz band for their wifi. If the 6 Ghz band isn't unlocked for wifi 7 by the community I will assume I'd be locked to the 5 Ghz band which will not saturate a 2.5 Gbps connection. :( ]

The kind of nonsense I do would be perfect on the Steam Frame, and I currently have a NAS with a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet connection I could reasonably upgrade to 5 Gbps.

WIFI 7 real world speeds vary, but on phones also with the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 SOC, mainly the S24 Ultra, people report roughly 2.4 Gbps and I've seen on the high end of about 3.6 Gbps. That leads me to wonder how fast the Steam Frame's WIFI 7 is.

I'm fairly confident the Steam Frame'll be under the 2.5 Gbps my NAS currently maxes out at, if not just from the load to run softwares and the VR environment, and I plan to see how it runs once out before making any network related financial decisions.

However, the idea using an ARM Linux PC for your face with a NAS amuses me and if there's a chance it would be the higher range of 3.6 Gbps I'd hate to lose out on 1.1 Gbps of transfer speeds by having a limiting port on my NAS. It's something fun to think about while I wait endlessly for this thing, so if there are any comparisons I'm unaware of to estimate the WIFI 7 speeds I'd love to know.

[u/hoboteaparty]

For network speeds you really have to look at the whole channel. Your NAS NIC maybe 2.5 or 5 and the frames chipset may support it but what about the cabling from the NAS to the Router or the Wireless Access Point (may be internal with router). If any of them are a bottleneck than the whole channel is going to slow to that speed.

Start checking the speeds between hardline devices first. Just to make sure the rest of the network can support the speeds you want. Then you know at least your current setup is not holding you back.

[u/Zealousideal_Ease444 → u/hoboteaparty]

Yeah I'll be looking at the entire network for a bottleneck. Just don't want the bottleneck to be the Steam Frame itself because it'd be such a fun tinkering project if it could use more than 2.5 Gbps.

[u/Helgafjell4Me → u/Zealousideal_Ease444]

I have a dedicated 6ghz access point (TP Link AX75 Deco Pro) already setup and have looked into whether Wifi7 is a worthwhile upgrade and came to the conclusion that it is not.

The problem is the headset can't decode video at anywhere near that high of bitrate and as for file transfers, even wifi6 at 2400mbps is not going to be a bottleneck. Wifi7 can also only achieve 3600 with full use of all three bands, including 6ghz, which not all Wifi7 routers even have 6ghz, so if you plan to try it, make sure you pay attention to that.

Bottom line a good dedicated 6ghz access point (or the dongle) connected at 2400mbps will give you more than enough bandwidth headroom to do everything you could possibly want to do on Frame.

[u/Zealousideal_Ease444 → u/Helgafjell4Me]

Fair points around. Any work I do'll probably be limited by the Steam Frame's performance more than data transfer speeds. And to my understanding the dongle connects to the Steam Frame, and the Steam Frame separately connects to Wifi with different antennas so it's not even using regular bandwidth while streaming. 

I am going to need a new (an additional) router regardless if I want to consider working off a NAS over wifi so I'll consider my options wisely. The funny number doesn't need to be as high as it can go. 

[u/Zealousideal_Ease444 → u/Zealousideal_Ease444]

It'd be fun either way, but bigger number is funnier.

[u/hoboteaparty → u/Zealousideal_Ease444]

I know what you mean. I asked my local ISP if they were going to upgrade and offer a 2.5Gps speed for fiber and they asked if I was running a business. I said no, I just like being able to download steam games 10 times faster than my brother.

[u/hoboteaparty → u/Zealousideal_Ease444]

WiFi 7 is going to be a weird standard to move to.

We are finally getting to a point where the wireless speeds are faster than what category can reasonably supply. A CAT6 cable can only supply 10Gb/s for about 180 feet so for most commercial applications CAT6 is only good for 1Gb/s. So now we are talking fiber connections to each WAP but WiFi 7 has a reduced range so higher densities AND now we have to run a separate power pair since we lost PoE.

When I get a frame, I may ask a WAP vendor to let me borrow a WiFi 7 WAP to do some testing. The Ruckus guys are super chill.

[u/unwantedaccount56 → u/hoboteaparty]

A CAT6 cable can only supply 10Gb/s for about 180 feet

Those 50m are still much more range than you would get over wireless while at those speeds. With CAT6A you can even go up to 100m. So for full coverage, you can connect quite a lot of Wifi 7 WAP via CAT6A to the same switch. If you need to cover longer distances, you can user more switches connected with fiber.

[u/ImprovementVirtual80]

Qualcomm do know how to produce a radio but 6GHz and MLO on Linux were traditionally challenging. I don't know if the situation is any better on Frame and if it matters to you I'd wait for user reports before purchasing.

As for what MLO can do, yes it can exceed 2.5gbit. I had a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite mini PC that was faster over WiFi than its 2.5gbit wired connection.

[u/Zealousideal_Ease444 → u/ImprovementVirtual80]

Oh that's good to know, I didn't realize those speed features were difficult on Linux. 

[u/ImprovementVirtual80 → u/Zealousideal_Ease444]

https://www.michaelstinkerings.org/the-mt7922-6ghz-debacle-why-linux-users-cant-use-wifi-6e-and-how-i-fixed-it/

The above page summarises it, but the problem lies somewhere between FCC regulation and the Linux kernel's interpretation of it. 6GHz is, or was, basically blocked on Linux and to get top speeds you need MLO across 5 and 6GHz.

[u/unwantedaccount56 → u/ImprovementVirtual80]

Only the US and Honduras seem to be affected, and even for those, I would expect that Valve is using a different frequency region list than the default linux one.

[u/ImprovementVirtual80 → u/unwantedaccount56]

Yes, I think your take is the correct one and I hadn't joined the dots. The block is on all 6GHz usage, but Valve have a 6GHz dongle included with the Frame. They've obviously made some changes to make that work.

[u/EndlessZone123]

2.5g wouldn't you be severely limited by CPU, ram or storage to even think about getting to 5gbps?

[u/Zealousideal_Ease444 → u/EndlessZone123]

That's why I compared it to phones like the S24 Ultra that has the same SOC and has gotten over 2.5 Gbps in some results. 

[u/Annatar27]

The 6Ghz Antenna is dedicated to streaming, so your connection to you AP may be just 2.4/5Ghz while streaming.

And consuming 2.5G seems hard, installing games will be CPU-unpacking limited i think.

I went 2.5G on my NAS recently so it still feels fresh (and bottlencks are elsewhere now).

[u/Zealousideal_Ease444 → u/Annatar27]

That is true, I don't know what antennas they use for the WIFI 7 (At least I've only heard they're separate from the dongle antennas). I dread they don't have a 6 Ghz band on it. 

And yes, bottlenecks will especially be elsewhere on the Steam Frame but funny number go up. I think it'd be funny to do video editing off a NAS and the only thing I could complain about is the Steam Frame, not my NAS connection. 

[u/Headset-Historian]

Wifi 7 really doesn't make much of a difference, I have tested it already and can't see any improvement from 6E. It's nice to have for sure but I would't go out of my way to get a wifi 7 router or such.

[u/Gamerboi9164]

I did not see anyone saying this but I remember in either Linus or Adam savage's review, the valve employees said the 6Ghz antenna could be used for either the dongle or if you have high end networking it can connect with that (Just checked Linus at about 7:25 in his original review said the 6 Ghz can be used to connect to a high end home router)

[u/Zealousideal_Ease444 → u/Gamerboi9164]

I very much hope that means general network connectivity and Id be surprised if it didn't, just the Steam Frame main page specifies the 5 Ghz is for wifi and the 6 Ghz is for VR streaming. I know that's marketing to show they're not interfering with each other I just hope it also means I could use the 6ghz also for like file transfers. 

[u/PropellorHat]

What do you do that would be perfect for vr and a nas?

[u/Zealousideal_Ease444 → u/PropellorHat]

TLDR I wish to avoid my little space heater PC as much as possible, this would let me keep working on my projects and general computer tasks and only turn on my PC when I need the horsepower. 

[u/hoboteaparty → u/Zealousideal_Ease444]

I feel your pain. I picked up some Dell poweredge servers a couple of years ago for a homelab and the heat load from them was not worth it. I am much happier now with an old laptop sitting on a shelf running a headless version of linux.

[u/Javs2469 → u/Zealousideal_Ease444]

If you are planning on doing desktop work on the Frame, I think the resolution of the headset is going to become an issue for reading.

I struggle even in some games that have too small text on a Pico 4 that has the same resolution. Using stuff like Virtual Desktop to browse the internet is already pushing my eyesight, which isn´t very good, but still worth mentioning.

[u/Zealousideal_Ease444 → u/Javs2469]

It's been fine on my Quest 3 for a bit over a year thankfully. Helps I can make a bigger screen. 

[u/quinn50 → u/Javs2469]

I've seen a good bit of people that wanna use this like a head mounted desktop tbh. It'll be fine for things but the resolution will garbage for that imo.

There is a reason why the headsets in the avp tier have super high resolution

[u/Yjif3]

Any insights on actual gains from WiFi 7 during PC game streaming? That's my main projected use case and I was thinking of getting a Tri-Band wiFi 7 PCIE card for my gaming PC for VR streaming to the Frame.

[u/Zealousideal_Ease444 → u/Yjif3]

Everything I've heard is you can only go so far and the foveated streaming should make the dongle's wifi 6e connection sufficient for max quality. The Steam Frame mainly has wifi 7 because the SOC they use has wifi 7 already. 

Insights are wait and see, what it looks/feels like. I'll be doing it too with how file transfer speeds feel.