Zwift Ride, Kickr Core2, iPad
I had to move to my setup top the garage where the wifi is weak.
In the house, I would connect everything via Wifi. The controllers and HRM are BT. Never any problems
In the garage, one ride my guy just stops pedaling, I connect the trainer via Bluetooth, starts riding again. Seems fine for one ride
Next ride, I connect via BT because of last ride but now I keep pedaling but the virtual shifting seems to be at minimum 30 seconds off. Like I’m in my top gear spinning out doing 150W and getting dropped, then after more than 30 seconds I find myself going uphill in my top gear eventually.
I have an iPhone that’s on Companion too.
Is there a reliable solution with iPhone, iPad, Zwift Ride, weak wifi? Some combination of connections that will work or do I need to move my router that I’ve needed to move for 6 years but have been reluctant to do until it affects my silly Zwift races
You should fix the weak WiFi but I’m unsure if that’s why you are experiencing such slow trainer response when pairing via Bluetooth. One reason might be that when you are distant from the router and signal is weak, your WiFi connections may fall back to 2.4GHz band which supports greater distance, but worse throughput, and that puts it in the same frequency band as Bluetooth so interference becomes more likely. In any case, having an unreliable network is the kiss of death for racing. That’s why I would start by fixing the WiFi problems, then maybe your phone and iPad shift to 5GHz WiFi.
I have a 2500 square foot house on two levels, router is upstairs, I ride downstairs. My solution was to use a TP-Link Deco two node mesh system that replaces the router. It really blankets the house in good signal everywhere. You can choose to have the auxiliary mesh node use either WiFi or Ethernet for backhaul to the node connected to your broadband service. Another option would be a powerline Ethernet system that puts a new access point in the training area without running new cabling. This should be adequate if your garage is on the same power panel as the place where the router lives. It probably won’t deliver throughput that is as good but would probably work fine. If you want to tell me more about your network equipment and which country you live in, I might have other suggestions. You might own a router that already supports adding mesh nodes.
I actually had to disable 5ghz and any nodes due to network stability issues. Took me a lot of debugging to figure it out, but that’s the most stable connection for my home network where I work remotely. Even power line stuff broke my internet
It doesn’t seem there’s any other solution than to fix my WiFi though
I guess I’ll have to bite the bullet and finally replace my ancient 2018 router
Yeah it does make sense if your devices were trying to use 5GHz but it sucked and for whatever reason they didn’t automatically switch to the 2.4GHz band, WiFi reliability could be bad. It doesn’t reach as far or penetrate as well through building materials. Another way to manage that is to give two different network names to the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands on the router and then make sure that the devices connect to the one you want.
Cant you run an Ethernet cable from the house to the garage to carry the wifi to a repeater.
It’s a rental, requires drilling through exterior walls or running 150’ cable over 5 doorways. (Will probably opt for the latter or more likely just move the router half way between)
Powerline Ethernet is the usual solution for that situation. Mesh network could do it as well but if both locations are on the same power panel then powerline might be good enough. Not as fast as Ethernet but fast enough for Zwift.