When the OLED decks first came out, many people found they had wifi issues after attempting to connect to 5Ghz wifi 6 enabled routers. This has thankfully been fixed with software updates, and is no longer an issue on new OLED decks.
Unfortunately, some of the refurbished OLED decks will still have this issue when first turned on. The problem will be fixed once the Deck updates, but you have to successfully connect to the internet before you can update, and this issue can make that hard to do.
The issue can also affect you if you do a factory reset on your OLED deck or reinstall SteamOS.
The issue: When connecting to a 5Ghz Wifi 6 network with certain Wifi 6 features turned on, the wifi card on the deck will crash. After that, it won’t connect to any network until the Deck is rebooted.
The fix: First, you’ll have to reboot the deck to restart the wifi. If it still doesn’t show wifi networks after rebooting, you may have to factory reset by holding the “. . .” button while booting up the deck and selecting factory reset from the menu there.
Once the deck is rebooting and can see wifi networks again, you need to connect to a 2.4Ghz wifi network and update the deck. You can alternatively disable wifi 6/AX features on your router temporarily,
Once the deck is done installing updates and rebooting, you should be able to connect to the faster 5Ghz network to download your games.
Overall it’s not a hard issue to work around, but it can be very confusing to a new user if they’re not familiar with the issue and the work around.
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If you have a USB Type C dock with ethernet, it should be solvable, right?
I would assume so, but I haven’t tried it.
A good option for some is just tethering your phone for the update.
My white OLED has connection issues to my Unifi 7 Pro AP. So it’s still pretty messy depending on your Wi-Fi setup.
Can you separate the 5 and 2.4 bands into separate SSIDs?
This is probably the easiest solution, it’s what enabled me to use wireless streaming with my quest 3, with it’s WiFi 6 jankyness
What kind of issues do you have?
You might try disabling some wifi 7 features as well and see if that fixes things. Different routers will have different settings, but some will let you change the wireless mode from BE (wifi 7) to AX (wifi 6) or to AC (wifi 5). If you go to one of the older wifi modes and you still have issues, it may be a defective wi-fi card in the deck.
Random disconnects. Sometimes I leave my Deck downloading something and come back later only to find out that the download stopped (connection timeout or similar errors). Steam switches to offline mode and to fix it I have to turn Wi-Fi off and back on, and sometimes only a full restart does the trick.
Thanks for the troubleshooting tips, but I’d rather not downgrade my home Wi-Fi because of one device having issues. I use many other Wi-Fi 4/5/6/6E/7 devices just fine on that access point and because I access files on a local NAS via wireless devices frequently, I kind of want the performance benefits of (up to) Wi-Fi 7.
Automatic band steering also works great with all other devices, so I’d rather not setup separate Wi-Fi networks for each band. Wi-Fi 7 can bundle bands together anyway, so I’d lose that ability as well.
I’ve read about quite a few people having issues with the OLED and 6E/7 APs, often related to 6 GHz so I’m pretty sure it’s not a defect specific to my device. You got me an idea though: maybe I can blacklist the Steam Deck from the 6 GHz band on my access point, not sure.
I didn’t think you should downgrade permanently, just was suggesting it as a temporary troubleshooting step for narrowing it down.
It’s not just you. I have a Unifi 7 Pro and an OLED Deck and I get WIFI weirdness too.
the OG steam decks have wifi issues. anyone know if the radio drivers are proprietary?
Both wifi drivers are in the linux kernel and open source as far as I can tell.
LCD deck uses
rtw88_8822ce, which has been in the linux kernel since 5/2019. Source code hereOLED deck uses
ath11k_pci, which has been in the linux kernel since 9/2023. Source code hereThe Arch Wiki page on the Steam Deck is also a good source for this sort of thing, since it looks at what’s needed to run standard Arch on the Deck.
oh ok that’s good I guess. they don’t work half the time.
Wait, the Deck doesn’t have an Ethernet port?
It’s a Linux machine!
I heard that some people even have phones nowadays without a single SFP port. Madness.
Most of the docks have an Ethernet port. But a lot of new deck owners won’t have a dock and may not have a USB-C Ethernet adapter lying around.
