Fixing my Wifi Adapter
I happen to have a TP Link Branded Adapter (T3U, but this fix should work on a variety of devices)
It turns out that a common problem is that it doesn’t use USB 3, and when I create a PAN (personal area network) - even if I set it to prefer 5GHz, the speed was abysmally slow.
I searched for quite a while for a fix, and finally stumbled on this beta driver from this TP-LINK post: Archer T3U Plus is causing BSOD when using a hotspot on Windows 11.
The install is fairly simple, extract the zip, and run Setup.exe.
DISCLAIMER:
The above driver is beta, I can’t offer a warranty that everything will work, and you’d have to ask TP-LINK directly if you aren’t sure about it, and also there may evntually be a driver update more recent (or perhaps there already is, as I stopped once I found a working solution).
in case the link rots I’ve also saved a web archive capture:
/web/20250614112350/https://static.tp-link.com/upload/beta/2022/202206/20220601/Realtek_WLAN_1030.44.0531.2021_Win20H1_RS1_Archive3_DUA_0530_U2U3.zip
(web.archive.org)
before / after
before:
consistently less than 50mbps with iperf3 direct ip access and a 5GHz hotspot to my Quest 3 512Gb. (Even the home router beats it ~min100 ~max150 ~avg130 with the 5GHz network it provides if I use the internal ip of my PC on that router)
after:
Rates:
[ 5] 0.00-1.01 sec 20.4 MBytes 169 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 1.01-2.01 sec 15.1 MBytes 127 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 2.01-3.01 sec 10.4 MBytes 87.1 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 3.01-4.01 sec 11.1 MBytes 93.6 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 4.01-5.01 sec 20.5 MBytes 173 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 5.01-6.00 sec 15.5 MBytes 130 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 6.00-7.00 sec 19.2 MBytes 161 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 7.00-8.00 sec 16.1 MBytes 136 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 8.00-9.00 sec 17.0 MBytes 143 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 9.00-10.02 sec 23.1 MBytes 191 Mbits/sec
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate
[ 5] 0.00-10.02 sec 168 MBytes 141 Mbits/sec receiver
whilst I didn’t record the rates from before changing drivers except by memory, there is at least a 3x improvement over the non-updated version, however if I compare it to the hoem wireless network, it barely eeks out an extra 10 Mbits out of 140 on average - perhaps not insiginificant, but I would not call it statistically significant without doing further testing.
However the one big benefit to using the Ad-hoc hotspot, is that I can Isolate my quest 3 from the home wifi plus it stays connected to my pc directly, and doesn’t migrate to the satellite AP, which would mean horrible speed and latency.