1st Gen 4K ATV Wi-Fi speed drop until restart

Apple News & Gear
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I am just posting about this to understand if anyone else had this issue as I never actually got around to understand what was going on but there is something funky about the 1st Gen 4K ATV Wifi, or perhaps some others but ive not tested others.

A full discussion about it can be found here at macrumors where I have posted lately and the OP was still around to comment.

Basically when you bring up your ATV from standby the WIFI is locked to like 1mbps, you can prove this by doing a speed test in infuse or internet speed test app, the results are the same. It seems to happen after a few weeks, I never found any pattern but it was definitely fine for a while. The way to fix it would be to power off at the wall or do a full restart in the tvOS, then WIFI speeds return to what you would expect.

This happened to me a couple years back when I first started using WIFI on a 1st GEN 4K ATV, I bought two exact same models, one for our main lounge and one for are ‘snug’ TV I guess. The lounge has always been using ethernet so never noticed it there. In the snug after a few weeks it happened, rebooted it thinking it was a one off, fast forward a couple months and it was clear it would repeat this fault every now and then. Problem I had was there was no way of getting ethernet to this location so I solved it by just placing a new Mesh device (adding to my existing mesh) near enough so I could just run an ethernet from the Mesh port to the ATV port. Now that ATV never has to use WIFI again, well it is but it doesnt know it :slight_smile:

So fast forward couple years, remember I said I bought two of the same and how the other one was in my main lounge on ethernet…well I bought myself a new 3rd Gen 4K ATV to replace this one in the lounge and then use this lounge 1st gen to hook up a new small TV in our kitchen. 3 weeks after installing it and switching it on the 1mbps issue is back and sure enough a restart fixes it, so this ATV also has the same issue but I never knew it until using its WIFI. But this TV is used alot by my wife and daughter and man we all know what its like when our ladies wanna use Infuse and it doesnt work perfectly, its like the world is ending and all the 100’s of hours you spent building the perfect wife friendly environment and media library might as well go down the toilet…

So I just again connected the ethernet via a Mesh device to avoid the ATV ever using the WIFI.

Its a totally bizarre event and although I know that it doesnt effect everyone there has to be a reason for it, ive checked everything and wont bore everyone now, indeed just using the ethernet port even if the signal is still technically going over wireless avoids it happening. So there must be something going on with the WIFI card on the ATV.

Thought I would just post to see if anyone had this before and just rebooted and didnt think much of it or maybe we just all use ethernet.

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What wifi are you using? Router etc. guaranteed that’s the culprit… especially if it spans across multiple devices.

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These days I have Ubiquity ER-X router and BT Wholehome wifi, but both of these are different to when the issue first happened.

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My recommendation would be to kill any QoS settings on your wifi system and disable and power saving and fast roam settings. Also disable any band steering.

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Haha, these devices are kinda basic dude but do a good job generally, I dont have any customisation like that apart from being able to turn off a ‘steered’ check box per WIFI connected device. I have BT Wholehome Mesh AC2600, my house is a really elongated shape with thick walls, it was too expensive to get something more enterprisey at the time, these have been great and only a couple are actually Mesh nowadays, the rest are all ethernet hooked up.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad test to turn off this ‘steered’ check box just for the apple TV?

Its the only option I have!

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Yep force it to 5Ghz. Also make sure your ER-X is running with hardware offloading enabled.

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Sure will give it a go on the Wi-Fi.

Yeah the ER-X is already configured that way, but this issue occurred long before I ever got one but it’s a good feature though!

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I did some more digging on this issue and tons of other people have this issue and it seems directly related to mesh wifi systems only. It seems to be some sort of bug on apples side and it seems to have existed for quite a while.

1 Like
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Doesnt surprise me that there is some common reason somewhere.

I didnt bother with forcing to 5ghz in the end, I just connected up a miniature plug-in wifi extender to my existing mesh and stuck it to the back of the TV, then ran an ethernet cable between the AP and ATV, so now the WIFI leg work is being done by the plug in wifi extender. Its a 19" TV in our kitchen so this is more than enough grunt to serve and it wont ever do this weird speed loss anymore :slight_smile: Constant 100Mbps is plenty.