Your WiFi is fast enough. That was never the problem.
The speed test passes every time you run it. Streams fail on the seconds between the tests, and nothing you measured was looking there.
Your WiFi tests at 300 Mbps. You stream at 6. The maths says you have room to spare.
You still drop frames.
Speed is an average, and a stream lives on the worst second
A speed test measures how much you moved over ten seconds. A live encoder pushes data every frame and cannot pause. What it needs is a floor, not a peak.
WiFi has no floor. It has a good average and occasional gaps, and the gaps are what you see.
Where the gaps come from
- Airtime is shared. Only one device transmits at a time on a channel. Everyone in the house, and every neighbour on that channel, takes turns.
- It is half duplex. Sending and receiving compete. Ethernet does both at once.
- Lost frames get retried. Radio interference means a retransmission, and a retransmission is delay you did not budget for.
- Rate adaptation. The radio drops to a slower, tougher rate when conditions worsen. It does that without telling you.
- Scanning. Some clients pause to look for better access points. That is a gap in the middle of your stream.
Run a continuous ping to your router for ten minutes while streaming. Watch the worst number, not the average. Under 5 ms with no spikes is healthy. Occasional 200 ms spikes are what your encoder is fighting.
If you cannot run a cable
- Use the 5 GHz band. More channels, less congestion, shorter range.
- Pick a clear channel by hand instead of trusting auto.
- Put the streaming machine in line of sight of the access point. One wall costs more than distance.
- Turn off band steering for that device and pin it to one band.
- Raise your SRT or protocol buffer. You are paying latency to absorb the gaps.
What a cable actually buys
Not speed. Consistency. A wired link delivers the same jitter this second as the last one, and an encoder can plan against that.
Powerline adapters and MoCA over coax both beat WiFi for this, and both are worth trying before you accept the gaps. A flat cable under a rug costs less than either.
Sources
The Rig Wire reports on streaming technology from public documentation, source repositories and vendor releases. We did not bench-test what is described here. When we have tested something, we say so.