[SOLVED] Wired and wireless connection between pc and oculus quest, using new access point.

[Blg79]

My current set up…

Router on ground floor (room GF1).
Pc in first floor room (room FF1).
Printer in first floor room (room FF2).

The pc has always been hard wired to the router with a cat5 cable, as mother board doesn’t have wi-fi and have wanted max speed.
I don’t have great wireless reception in any of the upper floor rooms, so a while back I purchased a set of wireless home plugs adapters, to get wireless connectivity for my printer and phone etc on upper floor rooms.
The pc is still hardwired with the original cat5, because when I tried to connect it to the home plug adapter (via a cable to bottom of home plug) it only ran at half the speed.
I use the upper floor home plugs for my phone and printer connection etc.
There are other random devices at ground floor that connect wirelessly to the main router (now tv stick, phones, laptop etc).

The main home plug adapter is connected to the router in GF1. The other 2 adapters are in each of the first floor rooms.


What I would like advice with…
I recently purchased an oculus quest 2. I would like to connect my oculus to my pc wirelessly with a fast reliable connection (I already own the oculus link cable, but want to try wireless).

From what I can find on the internet, my understanding is the best way to do this is to have a wireless access point in room FF1 that my pc and quest can connect to. I believe the oculus has wifi 6?, and I should use a 5g connection.

Does this mean if I purchase a wifi 6 spec access point with ports on the back, I can simply plug the access point in to the cat5 cable (connected directly to my router), then plug my pc in to a port on the back of the access point, and my pc will communicate directly with the oculus quest.

Will the access point provide me with a direct connection from my pc to the oculus via wi-fi, or will the access point still send info to router and then back to the pc (or if it does, is it relevant).


I guess I’m asking if this is the most optimal / fastest way to connect the pc to the oculus in my situation.
I’ve read that I can achieve a fast connection to my pc by putting my main router in to modem mode, then connect it to a new router in the upper floor rooms with cat5. However, I’m not sure that will work for me as I will lose the wireless connections downstairs.

Many thanks in advance for any advice / help you can provide me.
Ben

 

[bill001g]

So you have a ethernet running from the ground floor to your room with the pc ?

Although you can buy a AP you likely would be best off using a inexpensive router as AP. The other advantage is you can use the extra ethernet ports to plug your pc into. Now if you really want to use a actual AP you can put a switch in your room and then plug the PC and the AP into the switch. You would have to test it but I suspect this would provide good wifi for entire first floor and you could remove the powerline units if you wanted.

Like many wifi6 devices the oculus is what I would call a fake wifi6 unit. The largest reason wifi6 is faster is because it uses 160mhz bands but this is complex to implement in the current 5g band....wifi6e will be much simpler with all the radio bands in the 6g spectrum. Because of the restriction related to weather radar many devices and routers only implement 80mhz of bandwidth. 802.11ac also can use 80mhz bands so wifi6 using 80mhz is only very slightly faster than 802.11ac. Many times wifi6 running 2x2 mimo is slower than 802.11ac running 3x3 or 4x4 mimo. It is still very rare for any wifi6 device to support more than 2x2 mimo.

Using a wifi AP in the same room you should easily get 300mbps on 802.11ac which is more than enough for the oculus.

I would not spend the extra money for wifi6 AP/router. They are still kinda expensive and you still hear about lots of bugs. AND wifi6e is soon to market and will backward support wifi6 so you are better of waiting and spend you money on that rather than wanting/needing to upgrade your router in 6 months.

 

[Blg79]

So you have a ethernet running from the ground floor to your room with the pc ?

Although you can buy a AP you likely would be best off using a inexpensive router as AP. The other advantage is you can use the extra ethernet ports to plug your pc into. Now if you really want to use a actual AP you can put a switch in your room and then plug the PC and the AP into the switch. You would have to test it but I suspect this would provide good wifi for entire first floor and you could remove the powerline units if you wanted.

Like many wifi6 devices the oculus is what I would call a fake wifi6 unit. The largest reason wifi6 is faster is because it uses 160mhz bands but this is complex to implement in the current 5g band....wifi6e will be much simpler with all the radio bands in the 6g spectrum. Because of the restriction related to weather radar many devices and routers only implement 80mhz of bandwidth. 802.11ac also can use 80mhz bands so wifi6 using 80mhz is only very slightly faster than 802.11ac. Many times wifi6 running 2x2 mimo is slower than 802.11ac running 3x3 or 4x4 mimo. It is still very rare for any wifi6 device to support more than 2x2 mimo.

Using a wifi AP in the same room you should easily get 300mbps on 802.11ac which is more than enough for the oculus.

I would not spend the extra money for wifi6 AP/router. They are still kinda expensive and you still hear about lots of bugs. AND wifi6e is soon to market and will backward support wifi6 so you are better of waiting and spend you money on that rather than wanting/needing to upgrade your router in 6 months.

First off, thank you for replying. Much appreciated.
Apologies for my late response, work got in the way.

Yes, that’s correct. I have an ethernet running from ground floor to pc in upper floor room.

So, basically,

Forget about wifi6 as its not reliable at the moment, too expensive, and I won’t see any different any with the oculus.

Then, get myself a 5g router and use it as an access point.

Thanks for the above. However, I’m extremely bad with this type of stuff, so please can I ask a few more things.
…

• Do all routers have the ability to use them as an access point. If I just purchased any cheap 5g capable router, can I use it reliably.

• Also, just to double check. Is 802.11ac basically 5g?

• If I used a router as a ap, can I still do what you suggested about getting rid of the powerline adapters (in other words, would the router being used as an access poi8nt be as fast as an actual access point plugged in to a switch?

• And finally. Could I just use the router as a router, but plugged in to the router downstairs? Would this mean that it was like a mini network for my oculus and pc? If so, would this mean my pc would communicate faster with the oculus. Or am I just over complicating it and it would be just as fast using it as an access point.

Again, thank you in advance for the advice.

 

[bill001g]

You can search for how to use a router as a AP there are even youtube videos. Many modern routers now have a feature you just click a button but even without the feature it is pretty trivial.

802.11ac only runs on the 5g band

It is about the same. The lan ports on a router actually used to be a small switch chip, the same one that was used in 5 port switches, lately it is all on 1 chip kinda like how they put a video card into some cpu chips. It still functions as a separate unit.

It would not be faster to run as a second router. It makes things more complex because you now have 2 NAT routers so it makes stuff like port forwarding harder if you were to need that. It prevent machines connected from the main router from accessing machines behind the second router. This is either a good things or bad thing depending on how much sharing you need. In general unless you really need to restrict access all the issues it causes are not worth the headache.

 

[Blg79]

That's really cleared things up for me.


Many thanks for taking the time to advise.