My best rig, a homebrew desktop, is up on the third floor, using WiFi. I used to be able to stream Steam relatively well to a laptop on the first floor TV room, also on WiFI. Lately, the streaming is much slower.
I’ve done all sorts of tests. I can start Steam games but eventually the streaming degrades and grinds to a halt and the signal is lost. I’ve tried this with the desktop’s firewall (temporarily) off, but same result.
The only thing that has changed from when it worked well until now is that I left FIOS convince me to upgrade to a new router. The router seems fine, even faster, so I can’t imagine that would cause a streaming slowdown.
I have no way to put the desktop on ethernet without some expensive wiring. I brought the laptop up to the third floor, so the two devices were side-by-side, but had the same result.
When you say lately, do you mean during the Steam Winter Sale or before that? I ask because even some of my MP games (Steam hosted) have experienced server issues these past few weeks due to just more people playing these games and downloading.
Just since the sale. Interesting point. Perhaps I should wait until post sale. Although I imagined streaming was specific to my home network and would not involve Steam’s servers.
Is this just with Steam or is it any wifi connection?
Because this happened to me because my wifi-router was on its last legs. I was able to isolate it by running a speedtest (http://www.speedtest.net/) with my pc hooked up to the router, then I bypassed the router & connected directly … difference was astounding. Definitely pinpointed the router as the culprit.
Oh man, I think mine is nearing its end of life as well. It’s a Linksys WRT54G, from I think 2003. Pretty sure it was 2003, but it doesn’t seem possible that it could have lasted that long. EDIT: Yep, 2003. Wow.
The thing still works great as far as speed (as fast as I need it anyway), but I’m having to reboot it more and more frequently in the past couple of years, lately every week or two. Once rebooted however, it works just peachy.
