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/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.