Zwift and the joys of home networking

author Richard Fennell calendar Jul 13, 2020 · 3 min read · Tech Tips  ·
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During the Covid 19 lock down I have been doing plenty of Zwift'ing. However, I have started having problems getting the Zwift Companion App working reliably, when it used to work.

Basically, Zwift itself was fine, though very slow to save when exiting, but the companion app could not seem to detect that I was actively Zwift'ing, but it's other functions were OK.

After much fiddling I found the issue was the network connection from my PC up to Zwift and nothing to do with the phone app. But in case it is of any use to others here are the steps I took to

  • Ran a WiFi network analysis app and realised that
    • My local wireless environment is now very congested, I assume as more people are working from home.
    • Both the 2.4GHz and 5Ghz network were on the same channels as other strong signals.
    • Also they were using the same SSID, which is meant to provide seamless swap-over between 2.4 and 5Ghz. But, in reality this meant there were connection problems as a connection flipped between frequencies.

This explained other problems I had seem

  • The Microsoft Direct Access VPN I use to connect to the office failing intermittently. Obviously, any problems I have connecting to the office to do work is far less important than Zwift connection issues.
  • My Samsung phone would drop calls for no reason. I now think this was when it had decided to use Wifi calling and got confused over networks.
    Note: I had fixed this by switching off Wifi calling.

To address the problems I changed the SSIDs so that my 2.4 and 5Ghz networks had different names, so that I know which one I was using. Also I moved the channels to ones not used by my neighbours

Test

Result

Put the phone and the PC on the 2.4Ghz network

No improvement, app did not work and PC slow to save

Put the phone and the PC on 5Ghz

Small improvement, app still did not work but at least tried to show the in game view before it dropped out. The PC was still slow to save

Put the phone on either Wifi network but the the PC on Ethernet over Power using TPLink adaptors

This fixed it

So it seems the problem was upload speed from my PC all along. Strange as I would have expected the 5Ghz network to be fine, even if the 2.4Ghz was not. The 5Ghz Wifi seems to perform OK on a speed test.

Anyway it is working now, but maybe it is time to consider a proper mesh network?