Airlink Wifi Hotspot 2.0 Download
Andrea Bowden
Intel or W10 was just giving us a very use case specific bug. Then also, W10 had inconvenient wifi behavior. For whatever reason, when you connect the Oculus Quest 2 and windows 10 through a W10 hotspot, the OC2 is throttled. It wasn't antenna strength or anything like that. Just some glitch or some intentional throttling in how W10 does things. The solution is to connect a phone to the hotspot, disconnect it, then connect the OC2 to the hotspot. For whatever reason, this removes the rate limit behavior. Then you run a script or manually type in some things in command prompt to keep W10 from doing big wifi scans in the backround, as they introduce massive lag and big framerate drops.
Given I gave people the wrong impression about the viability of hotspots, I wanted to come back and correct things. I'd been trying to get hotspots to work for months and gave up late December, so I never knew the causes had been found, that scripts were written to make fixing it easy, and the like. Hoping to spread awareness to people who similarly tried many different hotspot cards / dongles and had no luck with any of them.
I think it is a bug in ALEOS. If I add my Home WiFi AP as a remote site for client connection and reboot the MP70, the MP70 connects to my home WiFi and I can connect devices to the WiFi hotspot on the MP70. The WiFi indicator light on the MP70 turns amber indicating it is using my home WiFi for WAN connection. If I then turn off my home WiFi AP, the clients connected to the MP70 AP stay connected, and the MP70 indicator light turns green indicating it is using LTE for WAN connection. If I now reboot the MP70 while my home WiFi AP is still off, the WiFi indicator stays off and the MP70 AP SSID is not available. If I now turn my home WiFi AP back on, the WiFi indicator turns amber again, but the MP70 WiFi AP SSID is still not available.
My PC is connected by ethernet to my wifi 5 router. If I connect the XR Elite to the router's wifi network, I can connect to my PC wirelessly and the PCVR streaming works through VIVE Streaming Hub + SteamVR.
My PC has a wifi 6 card, and I would like to use it as a hotspot to create a direct connection to the XR Elite for better bandwidth and without other traffic. In Windows 10, I can create a 'mobile hotspot' network and I can connect the XR Elite to this network. However, I can't see my PC from this network, and have no way of connecting to it wirelessly. I also don't see any setting in VIVE Streaming Hub about using such a hotspot network.
I tried this setup (win 11 hotspot with wifi6e card intel ax210)
And it works, but performance is pretty low. The reason is that Windows hotspot with 20Mhz bandwidth on 5Ghz and that's a bit shit honestly. There is currently no way to change the channel width on windows hotspot ?
Can you (or anyone else) confirm you got this to work with the XR Elite? I can only get wireless streaming to work for me if I have an intermediary router. When I try to use it as a hotspot, the headset never detects the PC's network (but other devices can see it just fine). I am hoping it is just an issue with the wireless card I currently have, but I was hoping someone can verify they have it working with the XR Elite connecting to a PC hotspot (since the above video is used with a Quest), since HTC's streaming page specifically says to not try using a hotspot...
While currently having other problems with streaming over Wi-Fi. I can confirm that connecting to the hotspot(Wi-Fi 802.11ax) and establishing a connection to streaming hub in general works.
And the problems I have, are also there when I'm using my intermediary router (Which is only Wi-Fi 802.11ac), so I guess it should work, if streaming over Wi-Fi works in general for you.
May I can fully confirm this, once I will be able to resolve my problems with the help of VIVE support.
Thanks for the lively discussion. Can you please indicate whether only VIVE Streaming Hub + SteamVR are necessary, or I need to purchase Virtual Desktop? I am unable to see the desktop to connect to when I connect the Vive XR Elite to my PC's hotspot network (Windows Hotspot, AX200). My PC has wired ethernet. I'd really appreciate some detailed steps on trying out this connection.
Edit: this information is partially wrong. Yeah, you could overheat a usb dongle as a hotspot, but otherwise... the real culprit here is some weirdness in either microsoft or intel's court. Something throttles the oculus quest connection speed when you connect it to the hotspot under w10. The fix, silly as it is, is to connect a mobile phone to the hotspot, then disconnect the mobile phone, the connect the oculus quest headset and start playing. For whatever reason, this fixes the throttling. Further, there are lag spikes caused by W10 checking into new wifi sources in the backround. Disabling this service while playing eliminates that. If wifi hotspot didn't work for you in the past, maybe this video will help you. =_vnfA4FKs88&t=94s -- I want to add, I tried EDUP, Fenvi and killer network cards. All of them exhibited both issues. I only still have the Fenvi and it works great after following the video directions. The only thing I'd add in, that wasn't in the video, is that I'd disable packet coalescing in the wi-fi adapter settings.
I'm just going to try to save some people the frustration and money here, by actually explaining why you cannot use a hotspot effectively to play airlink. If you already have a hotspot and that hotspot works? Great! Maybe you picked a hidden gem of a card, maybe your environment is conducive to hotspots. I feel that if you have to spend money anyway, and are trying to choose between a router and a wifi card, your money is better spent on a router. Having a hotspot work as well or better than a router is rare for most people.
So you have your heat managed, but you're still only getting 100 Mbps and spikes of latency. Well, this is where routers have you beat. Your average wifi card is omnidirectional signal strength 6db. No matter how you might modify your antenna by elevating it, buying a plate antenna, or buying scam antennas that claim they have a higher omnidirectional db rating, you cannot get any more broadcasting power without putting more electricity into it. Your wifi card, be it desktop or laptop, is not designed to do this. By contrast, the average router will have a broadcast strength and receiving sensitivity of 30db to 40db and this is exactly why your hotspot can never compete. A router never misses a reply because it's got very sensitive "ears" and it never fails to be heard because it's shouting with a megaphone. ((Actually, I regularly see that good routers can hear devices down to -70db or -90db, pretty handy if you're streaming hand motions in real time!))
The broadcasting regulations limit wifi hotspots intentionally, so that they do not cause more wifi pollution that would disrupt neighbors or other people such as utility workers or weather stations. If your hardware is legal, it is crippled by design.
Other reasons not to do this include; Amplifiers that work in the 5ghz range are usually more expensive than routers. They're not FCC cleared. The regulatory stickers are usually fake. They can fry components in your computer unless they're made right and they often aren't. Amplified signals can cause health problems, and even the most basic amplified antenna advise you not to be hanging around next to them. Oh, and most online amplifiers are unidirectional, that means you don't get a boost on send and receive, just sending. Your wifi hotspot will still fail to "hear" information being sent by the quest in a reliable manner.
Best practice, from the virtual desktop community, has been to use a dedicated router that is wifi 5 or 6. You would basically arrange it so that your network map looks like your ISP source -> Household primary router -> Router dedicated to oculus -> Your computer and your oculus. You will need to learn how to avoid "Double NAT", as this can hurt gaming and other programs. You should also learn about "Bridge mode" or passthrough as it can be called, as well.
Finally, if you want to use one router, find a router with multiple 5ghz bands. Put all your household wifi stuff on the 2.4ghz and first 5ghz band, and only have your oculus on the second 5ghz band. Try to pick something with marketing information that includes a quadcore processor inside the router, and the more buffer ram, the better. If it says absolutely nothing about ram, don't buy it for this purpose.
I found that my router works ok, but i wanted to try and use my pc as a hotspot and directly connect to it. This should have negligable speed gains but as it would be the only device to connect to that "router or hotspot" it would work out better.
As i was tinkering with the adapter i went to the Device manager > Intel(R) Wi-Fi 6 AX 200 160Mhz device > Properties > Advanced and selected the 5ghz band ( also checked the 2.4ghz). There i could only select 20Mhz all of the others werent able to be selected. The options to select were 20Mhz and Auto. I would like to know if i can make a hotspot, and force it to use the 160Mhz band or 80 etc. ( those that arent as crowded ). Any help would be much apreciated. Thanks!
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