Wednesday, December 8, 2021

Network Issues on the PlayStation 5

A few weeks ago I noticed that my PS5 kept dropping its network connection. While it wasn't a big deal for solitary gaming, it sure made watching a streaming movie tough. My WiFi access point had been having some issues and so I had spent time fixing that. Unfortunately that did not resolve the issue with the PS5. I was in a troubleshooting mood and so I spent some time searching the Internet for similar issues that others may have had.

I came across a number of posts where other PS5 owners kept having the console drop their WiFi connections. The solution was to turn off automatic frequency selection and limit the WiFi to just 2.4 GHz. The frequencies available to WiFi are either 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz with the faster speeds generally found on 5 GHz. While the PS5 has the hardware to take advantage of the higher frequency, the software engineers did a poor job of implementing support for it. That just means once a patch is made available, PS5 owners will be able to go back to 5 GHz.

I gave the solution a shot and regained my stable WiFi connection. Ultimately that was not the problem though. The fix worked because my new television also has WiFi capability and it turns out that the TV and PS5 kept interfering with each other. I really would like to go back to the 5 GHz signal for the PS5 and so I looked if I could set the TV to use 2.4 GHz but cannot.

Forcing the WiFi connection on the PS5 to 2.4 GHz seems to be working for now but I look forward to the day when I can go back to 5 GHz WiFi. At least I can watch a whole movie without it pausing while the stream buffers.

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