Topic: Am I really going to have to get a signal booster JUST for my Switch?

@Cobalt
Well good on ya but that's not really much of a counter point. Rather than whinging on forums about how bad the Switch is why don't you resolve the situation? There are ways to improve your home network. Really, if your WiFi setup is so bad that it renders the Switch completely useless it's your WiFi to blame more than the Switch.

Just to prove a point I just picked up my Switch and forced it to connect to the 5Ghz band on one of my APs at one end of the house through several brick walls. Literally worst case scenario. The WiFi signal strength indicator is indicating 1 bar which makes sense given the scenario. Even so this is enough to watch a HD trailer with little to no buffering. So I call BS on your BS calling.

@Cobalt @skywake I have to agree with @Cobalt here. I understand what you're saying @skywake but the thing is, in exactly the same location my Wii U was and within a few meters when I bring my phone to the location, the Switch loses connection fairly frequently. If every other device operates fine with two bars except for the Switch with zero bars, IMHO it's pretty hard to blame the wifi network rather than the Switch. Of course your suggestions are the only way to fix the issue regardless of what's at fault, but I do think it's a bit of a stretch to blame a user's WiFi instead of the Switch when in the exact same location every device except for the Switch connects well.

@skywake

The Switch is a good system but with many flaws.

I refuse to be a Nintendrone, or a PS4ron or an Xboner.
I just say what I think and not what I read on the internet. The same for an opinion about a game, the same about what I like and what I don't...

So please, stop saying that I say "how bad the Switch is".

I have an issue with the Wifi, like other people have issues with the joycons, like other ones have issues with plastic cracks etc...etc...

The attitude of hiding the truth or facts is a nonsense. How Nintendo could solve problems if nobody says anything ?

You can google the WiFi problem, you can google the joycon problem, you can google the cracks problem, you'll see that it's just the reality and not " stupid people who don't know how to set up the WiFi, to take care about their Switch etc..."

To conclude, if everything is perfectly fine with your Switch, that's great and I'm honestly happy for you but don't judge other people who have real issues.

PEACE

@Cobalt Regarding Switch Wifi there are 3 possibilities, and only 3 possibilities for your experience:
1) Your switch is defective and in need of replacement/repair.
2) You are using the 2.4GHz band (Switch is painfully sensitive to interference on the 2.4Ghz band, and arguably should have just required the 5Ghz band from the start. It's included for legacy compatibility.)
3) Your Wifi environment is worse than you think it is. (this includes things like sharing an SSID with your 2.4 and 5GHz radios, which some routers default to and should never EVER be used. There is a particular technology that manages clean handoffs between bands for devices as needed, I can't recall the term atm, it's fairly esoteric, and it exists on virtually no consumer grade equipment. If you use the wifi in an airport, train station, McDonalds, etc, the commercial routers there might be using that, but on consumer equipment if you set the same SSID for both bands you may ping pong back and forth between bands as signal strength ebbs and flows, disconnecting you constantly. ) Switch really needs the 5GHz band (you can consider it a defect of the 2.4Ghz antenna, but you really wouldn't want to use Switch on the more latent 2.4 anyway...) Ignoring the number of "bars" shown (which is arbitrary and meaningless on all devices. RSSI and SNR are what matter. Bars are meaningless values based on those that every manufacturer has a different meaning for, often to make telcos look good, Switch seems to have no worse WiFi (on the 5GHz band) than any other device (flagship phone, an ultrabook, etc.) 2.4Ghz is a different story, it definitely doesn't work well.

Switch isn't particularly finnicky at 5Ghz. It's the 2.4GHz band that gives it a bad rep. Yes, that's poor, considering that's a legacy feature anyway, it's fair to acknowledge that issue, but also incorrect to paint the whole Switch networking with that brush. Modern phones and laptops expect 802.11AC as well. For once Nintendo is with the times. Embrace it.

Now if your'e really using it on the 5GHz band and a clean environment then, yes, it could be a defective unit. It doesn't have the overall design issues that the early Asus Transformer tablets had though (who knew putting a radio antenna behind a sheet of aluminum causes poor wifi performance? Apparently not Asus... )

Now where I will condmn the Switch is its horrible download rates and frequent disconnects when downloading, even running wired ethernet(!) That's an eShop issue and/or a system write speed issue more than the networking itself though. I can download Halo MCC on X1X in about the time it takes to download the Wolfenstein patch on Switch.

So if I understand it, the situation of the OP is as follows:

1.Parents have a home office on the 2nd floor that needs internet connection
2. OP wants to use the switch in the basement, located on the opposite side of the house both vertically and horizontally from where the router is physically located.

Have you considered moving the modem to the FIRST floor in an area that's midway between where the home office is and where your switch is located?

Your switch is docked, congratulations, it's Still USING WIFI. Position of the router vs position of electronics still can create dead zones or areas of reduced signal strength. My apartment has only one place I can put my router. It's a small apartment, and there are areas where there is reduced signal strength. You have two floors, lots of wiring, and I don't know how many electronics and kitchen devices (such as a microwave) between the router and switch. All of which can interfere with the signal.

Right now a TELEVISION being in path between my switch and the router means it sometimes loses signal momentarily. The (usually running) computer and other electronics don't help either. Move the switch out from behind the TV (such as using it in handheld mode) and those connection issues vanish due to the tv not providing interference. I took it down into the basement for an experiment, and guess what? Connection issue due to distance from router. Same thing happens if I'm trying to go online on the 2nd floor on the other side of the house.

This happens with my PS Vita too. So it's not exclusive to the Switch.

@NEStalgia You made some great points, but I have to agree with @Yorumi in regard to the Switch antenna. You also said it yourself — the Switch’s 2.4 ghz band is extremely sensitive compared to other devices. That shows how bad the Switch WiFi antenna is. If the 3DS and the Wii U which also had a 2.4 ghz band worked wayyy better in terms of range than the Switch does, it most definitely is a problem with the Switch. It has legacy support with the 2.4 ghz band but that doesn’t mean it can have performance so bad on the band that it can’t even connect one floor down. Even the 5ghz band on the Switch has a lower range than other devices which can use the 5ghz band, like my iPhone. I’m surprised the Switch has such bad WiFi in terms of range, and even more surprised that Nintendo hasn’t fixed it 1 year after release and even MORE surprised that very few people are calling them out on it.

@Yorumi I tend to buy well researched quality WiFi gear (as I'm sure you do as well), and I've found that 2.4 is very spotty. I got constant disconnects on the other side of a Window outdoors, and even putting a 2.4GHz miniature repeater outdoors next to me to repeat the signal, it was still iffy....I believe it picks up interference at 2.4 Maybe internally generated interference. But 5GHz it runs through all the walls, all the way at the end of the yard, just fine, same as my phone. It shows less bars but the bars mean nothing. Signal seems solid. (I'd swapped routers in the past year, but all my problems from far away went away even with a cheap 5ghz, even through several walls.) 2.4 is flat broken. 5 seems ok, ignoring the low bars it shows.

As for the low quality NIC...it's nVidia. Do you not remember Sandforce?

Note that the download speeds are not related to the NIC/WiFi at all. You can't gauge performance on that. I can speed test on Switch at 20mb/s or so (pitiful) but I feel like it's a CPU limitation or something. Actual downloads are even slower. The download speeds are identical when downloading over wired ethernet with the HORI official USB adapter. As are the frequent "the download stopped unexpectedly" errors. Wired, wireless, same performance/connectivity, so the problem isn't the NIC there it's either the CPU bottlenecking it, a power restriction for downloads, or just general eShop suckage. And wired is registering as a full gigabit link on the switch (switch, not Switch.)

More telling, you know that feature that is kind undocumented where you can transfer patches from one switch to another switch locally over ad-hoc WiFi? I've used that for some things like the L.A. Noire install. It's the same exact speed as eShop downloads and ethernet. Again, either a CPU constraint or a write speed constraint is the issue with downloads.

I've actually found wifi tends to perform FASTER than wired ethernet...just by a smidge. There's definitely limitations affecting download that have nothing to do with the antennae.

@shadow-wolf Yeah 2.4 is terrible. In some ways it would have been better if they just disallowed 2.4GHz entirely, some modern devices have been doing that (there's a push to clear up all 2.4Ghz radios so they can be used for the newer AD standards without interference), but since Switch might end up used in random public places, I think they wanted to keep the ability to connect open.

Specifically the 5 though, I'm not sure the range is all that limited. I haven't tried pushing the range (I.E. my router is broadcasting sufficiently high power my phone doesn't switch to cell until the end of my street....Switch probably doesn't have that kind of range, though it's a little crazy for any device to have that range. I think if Switch is having issues on 5 there's something else going on.

In fairness, Switch's WiFi (particularly 2.4Ghz) isn't as solid as WiiU, but PS4, at least OG PS4's WiFi makes Switch look like a satellite array. It's pretty much unusable. It's not a portable device, but still, not everyone has ethernet to their TV and rackmount switches in their living rooms

@Yorumi LOL, yeah...there is that...

I'm still thinking CPU. PS4/X1X can download 245 average 300 max (seems to be capped by the HDD write speed, local transfer is the same, but averages slightly faster, maybe 275-315)....but if I have a game running, downloads drop to 3-18....if PS4/X1X has a CPU limitation, I can imagine a Tegra.

@Yorumi It's possible in Switch's case it's not a pure hardware limitation but a hard power use restriction. I know Vita defaults to "use wifi in low power mode" which contrary to belief is not for leaving WiFi on in sleep mode but in fact forces the wifi chipset to never exceed low power mode (Remote play was a no go for me for years before I discoverd that.) Maybe Switch does the same but doesn't allow enabling full power mode? But that makes no sense that ethernet would be restricted too. Maybe it's a power restriction on the SD reader? (I haven't tried writing to internal memory for downloads....)

To be fair back 20 years ago we were downloading stuff at 56kbps....128kbps if we were really really fortunate. Switch can handle that even while gaming. And X1X doesn't fare much better while gaming....

Edit: And back then it took like 2 hours to compress a CD to MP3s

Yeah, I suppose 2-3Mbps DSL was common at that point....I was still on dialup that's for sure

@Yorumi That.....actually makes no sense as to why it would run that way. Laptop integrated graphics are so useless! I wonder if that says more about the effort most 3rd parties put into their console ports more than the hardware itself. Or Warframe is more CPU-bound than GPU-bound. I referred to consoles in another thread today as "cheap gaming laptops without a screen"....and they are! But gaming laptops. not integrated graphics laptops

@Yorumi Oh, well ryzen is a bit different. Not sure if the next consoles will be ryzen based, at least XBox but there's a good bet. Not really fair to compare the 5.5 year old PS4 against a just-released-this-year architecture. That's kind of like saying "X1S sucks because X1X is more powerful"...well, duh, it's a newer part with higher specs and a higher price. "Integrated graphics" makes me think Intel IGP, not Ryzen which the whole point is effectively a real GPU on the die.

I don't know about Sony/MS convincing people wrongly the consoles are powerful. At the time of release the PS4 was modestly powerful, ok for the price. Sure it's an old box now, but it's a cheaper box now too. X1X just last year was pretty powerful when announced, with comparable PCs costing a good deal more. The CPU sucks but the GPU really was unapproachable for the price point. Flash forward a year, and sure if you'e buying newest on the shelf PC hardware the equation changed a bit. But then the new consoles will refresh...rumor is Sony will use something Ryzen based. that's 2 years away minimum so it's really hard to gauge what kind of value it will or won't be.

But the point of the "PC twins" is clear enough, a reasonably cheap gaming PC, in a petite shell, with the kinks and compatibility and cooling issues worked out to make it unobtrusive and everything works as an appliance without bothering with a keyboard and configuration. Not sure why we need two of those...mostly one for Sony exclusives and one to get the setup right without quirks. That laptop fares well with Warhammer but could you take the PC edition of every game hitting PS4 and expect it to be playable equally well with a PS4 or a serious gaming PC? Probably not...because nobody's optimizing for that laptop configuration, not because it's not technically capable of it.

Basically the current console design is what Valve was going to do with Steambox, but never really got there so they beat them to it.

@FaeKnight said "So if I understand it, the situation of the OP is as follows:
1.Parents have a home office on the 2nd floor that needs internet connection
2. OP wants to use the switch in the basement, located on the opposite side of the house both vertically and horizontally from where the router is physically located.
Have you considered moving the modem to the FIRST floor in an area that's midway between where the home office is and where your switch is located?"

I'm sorry but I live in an apartment of 150 square meters on one floor...

@Yorumi
The problem is that people are diagnosing a "problem" by looking at that speed tester and signal strength indicator. Neither tell the full story. The Switch at 1 bar will likely have a higher link speed than the 3DS at full strength. The speed tester is to Nintendo's download servers not to a site designed to give you performance metrics for broadband. But these are the tools people use so they jump to all kinds of conclusions.

@Cobalt
You've been in multiple threads whinging about the Switch. So yeah, I'm judging you here. Especially given I literally tested it's WiFi in my previous post. Yes, the Switch has some issues. Yes there are defective units. This happens with all products and popular ones especially will have pages of people singing from the same page. But in this case it's not the Switch to blame.

@skywake

Do you have Nintendo shares ? ^^

It's like you can't see what is the problem here. I'm sorry but the WiFi is bad, there is nothing wrong to just talk about a fact. I don't say it doesn't work at all, no, I say, compare to my other devices the Switch has the worst Wifi compare to whatever I could use in comparison... Wii U, pad, phone, PS4 etc...

PEACE

@skywake I understand where you're coming from. You're presenting valid points especially based on the experience you have (I think you said you're a networking professional?). That being said, I think you may not be quite getting what me, @Yorumi and @Cobalt are trying to say when we are discussing the Switch's WiFi.

We aren't debating about speeds of the Switch; the Switch is plenty fast when it has a connection. But that's the key term here: WHEN it has a connection. We're talking about the WiFi range of the Switch being disappointingly small, not the speeds itself. So I apologize if I didn't communicate that clearly enough — we're talking about how incredibly small the WiFi range is. At least for me personally, the Switch is plenty fast with WiFi speeds; it's just its range that's the issue for me (and @Yorumi and @Cobalt).

And I think you can test what we mean. Try bringing your Switch and your smartphone far from your router. See what bars your Switch has when your smartphone in the exact same location has 3 bars, 2 bars, and 1 bar. When my smartphone is alternating between three bars and two bars, the Switch has 1 bar and occasionally dips to zero bars.

I understand what you're saying about how the bars aren't an accurate representation of the speed/range. But I think they're accurate enough in that when there's zero bars for the Switch the speed drops from 8 mbps (which my Switch has with one bar and is more than serviceable for online gaming) to 300 kbps and there are connection issues in games. The Switch itself is telling me this. Meanwhile, my Wii U has two bars in the same location and never dropped a game due to a lack of connection IIRC.

So I think there's enough people discussing this topic that it genuinely seems like a flaw of the Switch that Nintendo bafflingly has not addressed more than a year after launch. I've talked to many people as well who told me that the Switch in their experience has a much lower range than their other devices (like the 3DS or the Wii U). At the end of the day of course, your suggestions to fix the issue are the only ones that can be done because Nintendo isn't going to change the WiFi antennas in any Switch. But I think it's definitely a problem of the Switch's hardware and WiFi antenna, not the router/WiFi itself, when the Switch can't get a signal when basically every other device can not only get a signal but get a really good signal in the exact same location as the Switch.

@NEStalgia I'd actually like to respectfully disagree with your assessment of 2.4 ghz based on my experience. I find that 2.4 ghz is more than capable of keeping a continuous, strong connection that is fairly large (so that a device two floors away from the router can still get 2 bars of WiFi). So in my experience 2.4 ghz has always been great. The only device I have ever had that struggled with the range of 2.4 ghz is the Switch. Besides the Switch the latest video game system I have is the Wii U, so I cannot compare to a PS4 or Xbox One and cannot tell if this is a new trend for modern game systems. But my smartphone, which released November 2017 and was a flagship, almost certainly supports both 2.4 ghz and 5 ghz and keep a strong, steady connection on 2.4 ghz. So I don't know if you can say all modern electronics are struggling with 2.4 ghz.

@shadow-wolf
That test I did yesterday the Switch was reporting 0-1 bars. The link speed was going between 20 & 60Mbps. This would give you real world performance around 10-30Mbps. By comparison the 3DS could only connect at 54Mbps MAX because it was 802.11g.

The bars mean jack.

I believe what you're talking about is Zero Handoff. There are a couple of things worth pointing out about it. Firstly it's not about making smooth transitions between 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz, that's not how it works. It's a technology that works across a single band across multiple access points. Essentially your device only sees one access point which means you never have a point where you lose your connection while roaming.

But there are disadvantages which is why most people don't bother with it. On a more traditional multi-AP setup what happens on one AP doesn't impact on other APs. With Zero Handoff because you're effectively running "one" AP all of the bandwidth is shared. Plus WiFi is actually designed to handle the same SSID across multiple radios anyways. The higher end APs that support features like Zero Handoff are, if anything, a bit better at it.

With all that said, it's very rare that you find a device that actually plays ball and the Switch is no exception. If you have multiple radios, and this includes dual-band "routers", there isn't really any logic to what radio things will connect to. My 3DS for example sits next to one of my APs but if I look at the connection history it will connect to the AP at the other end of the house. My phone is still connected to the AP at the front of the house despite being here next to my other AP. There's enough overlap with my setup that this isn't an issue but still.

Even so, I suspect that the vast majority of these "Switch has horrible WiFi" stories are just people discovering how bad their WiFi is. If they had a better setup or at the very least understood what to look for and what all of the things they are looking at meant they wouldn't be complaining.

Everyone else here is talking about their feeling of how bad it is. I literally ran a test on both real world bandwidth and linkspeed. So don't accuse me of that because I'm pretty much the only person in this thread bringing the metrics

If OP hasn't already done so, get one of the AC LAN adapter sets mentioned earlier. That's probably going to be your best solution that keeps the rest of your house set up intact an undisturbed.

@skywake @NEStalgia I think there's no point in explaining how communications tech works at this point. Feelings and facts don't mix. But I definitely agree that the Switch excels at showing people how malnourished their WiFi is (and has been). When you can purchase a wireless router for $30 or $200+, folks should suspect there's alot of differences in those magic boxes.

As for me, i've got a dual band 802.11b/g/n/ac. I've got both the 2.4 and 5GHz radios set to not broadcast their (different) SSIDs. I've got the Switch in a DMZ. I've got the MTU set properly. I've got the channels set properly. My only device on the 5GHz is the Switch. I've never experienced any issue, be it in the main room, garage, or in the yard.