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blogs/2026-06-27_steam-deck-wifi.md

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+title: Steam Deck's WiFi troubles discovered through doing something it wasn't designed for, part 1
+date: 2026-06-27
+tags:
+  - Steam Deck
+  - Network
+  - Hardware
+wiki:
+  publish: false
+---
+
+I have a Steam Deck OLED (512GB) and I pretty much like playing games with it. Then I run into a problem that I don't really have games that fit the Deck form factor really well. Shape and size-wise it's a mobile device with a very good built-in controller. The touchpad-as-mouse is good but not as good as a mouse or a trackball.  
+And for reasons I won't disclose because I don't exactly know myself, I picked Arknights: Endfield to be my controller-native game to play on the Deck. I imagined that with the outrageous mobility of your Steam Decks, it'll be fully possible to enjoy the unnecessarily complicated modern mobile game while lying in bed, connected to WiFi.  
+That's where things started to go wrong, fortunately.  
+
+**Spoiler / TL;DR**: It's the wireless NIC being shit.  
+
+## Running a Windows-oriented modern online game on SteamOS was not a problem
+So I won't go too deep into this. As simple as booting every relevant Windows exe through Steam using Proton. Then you could have the game executable running.  
+I'll leave some *useful tips* that may or may not apply to everyone.  
+
+- Deck is not exactly the biggest graphics powerhouse and my experience is only the lowest of low graphics is playable. Good thing is the screen is also not the biggest and that actually does real-world supersampling for your eyes.  
+- While debugging things people tend to use the desktop mode, which itself is a Wayland compositor. The game will be a different compositor created nested within the desktop one. Resulting bug is that the game runs in a weird 800x800 resolution.  
+  This does not happen in 'Game Mode' which does not have a desktop. Games are generated as tier-0 (or -1, depends on where you live) `gamescope` objects or something like that, and takes up the whole screen without much problem.  
+
+## Problem I didn't expect and ruined the whole lying in bed plan
+Modern online games has mad UDP traffics for various reasons: progress tracking, anti-cheat, hotfix, etc etc. Endfield is a modern online game and it has mad traffics.  
+These connections happen once you finish the de facto single-player tutorial part. Which is why I didn't realise there was a problem while playing through the tutorial on WiFi.  
+
+As soon as the mad online checks kick in, I get stuck in a storm of tiny disconnections before eventually timing out or simply getting disconnected. On WiFi. Unable to play the game in any meaningful sense, too.  
+
+It's so apparently a network problem with a slight probability of being anti-cheat related. So a hunt began.  
+
+### Tracking down the culprit
+#### the environment
+I'll run you through the house's network setup very quickly:
+- Rakuten Hikari Modem (ONU)  
+- FriendlyElec R5C router with OpenWrt
+- H3C NX54 WiFi router but used only as WiFi AP
+- Several switches for expanding RJ45 port counts
+- End devices
+
+The first easy thing to try is simply getting a Type-C dock and plugging in an RJ45 wired Ethernet. And play the game. And the game plays. I actually did this verification way longer than I should, but that's the point: you really can play Arknights: Endfield on a Steam Deck.  
+
+Both the wired and wireless networks in the house aggregates to the same gateway, a FriendlyElec R5C router; but WiFi radio waves are served by another device, a H3C NX54. It doesn't change the picture too much if my R5C has a radio, though.  
+
+Jumping to conclusions, a simple series of binary variable controlling narrows down the source very well. My actual process was way more messy and I would rather not talk about it.
+- **heat 1**: wired v. wireless  
+  Wired works, and wireless doesn't. So it's a wireless-only problem.
+- **heat 2**: WiFi AP v. WiFi client  
+  
+
+
+Notes:
+
+WiFi 5 v. WiFi 6 : not the core reason
+