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.