Samsung Q70AA 65 TV -- bad wifi signal

Hi all,

the other day we removed the TV from the wall mount and placed it 30 cm away from the wall onto the ground. The wifi connection issue persists. Then, I also went through the troubles of placing the wifi extender on different locations, turn it off completely, set the router to 2.4 Ghz or 5 Ghz only…you name it. We spent about 2 hours.

About the wall mount: There is a hook which fits between the wall and the TV. This hook is used to unclip the mount and the TV can then be lifted out.

About the house: It is a newly built house and designs were definetely more important than functionality. For what it’s worth, the AC unit and other electric compounds are not working properly either. Just recently the fridge compressor broke down (after only 2 years)… but that’s another story. The distance between router and TV is about 10 metres. I have no idea about the cabeling of this house and whether it would be possible to use ethernet or not.

I will definetely buy some USB and HDMI extension ports. With our mount, it is possible to push a USB port between the TV and the wall and pull it out whenever required. This way it doesn’t interfere with the asthetics.

I will also buy some sort of Amazon Fire Stick device. This way I am hoping to have sufficient wifi connection and I can install other apps that are not available on Samsung (like Jellyfin). And I can work around the Samsung TV requiring an account. Theoretically, I should be able to plug in such a Fire Stick into the HDMI port and still use the wall mount. But I have to use the TV’s USB port to power the stick, rather than an external adapter. The Samsung TV has a 1A USB port which is the same power than the power adapter can provide, so I think this should work fine.
Not sure if it will be the Amazon Fire Stick or a similar device, I will need to do more research. I assume the Amazon Fire Stick also requires an account, which is exactly what I don’t want.

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Steel-framed? I’m just wondering why you are having problems with WiFi even with the TV removed from the wall.

You should eliminate competing WiFi as an explanation e.g. can you receive the WiFi from neighbours? What kind of distance from neighbours is the house?

… and also eliminate RF interference as an explanation, particularly in the 2.4 GHz band. (However the 2.4 GHz band is preferable from the point of view of signal range.)

It would be fair to wonder also whether the WiFi client device in the TV is just faulty e.g. not connected to its internal antenna.

As @grahroll implies, while the TV is down on the ground, test WiFi connection on the TV with the WiFi source facing the back of the TV.

Is this a USB port for providing power only? Because that would be an unusual amperage for a standard (data) USB port. What kind of USB connector? USB-A? USB-C? USB - Wikipedia

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I ordered an Amazon Fire Stick a few days ago and it already arrived in the mail yesterday. I removed the TV from the wall and plugged in the Fire Stick. The Fire Stick has a perfect wifi connection and the content on the Fire Stick appears in high quality and without any buffering. I think it is safe to say that either:
a) the TV is faulty
b) this type of Samsung TV has general wifi connection issues

@Person:
I have an up-to-date router which uses automatically the best wifi band / the least used band. Living in suburbia, I do receive some neighbor’s wifi, but that can’t be avoided. It has never been an issue with other electronic equipment. Using one wifi extender gives me perfect results for my Fire Stick as well as for my laptops and phones.

This Samsung TV has 2 USB ports type A. One is 1A and the other one 0.5A

Just a few word about the Amazon Fire Stick:
I ordered the Fire Stick because:
a) the in-laws want to avoid any necessary cables showing. Therefore, it needed to be a HDMI stick which stays behind the TV.
b) a HDMI stick which can be powered by the TV’s 1A USB type A port, rather than an external power adapter.

Originally, I didn’t want to buy proprietary equipment like the Fire Stick, but I did so anyway because of lacking alternatives. From my research, I could only find native Android TV sticks from Blaupunkt and Xiaomi, both having little and not very convincing reviews. The Fire Stick on the other hand had brilliant reviews. The Google Chromecast with Google TV had even better reviews but requires an external power adapter.

I settled with the Fire Stick and after pluging everything in, I got a message which told me that I should use an external power adapter because it is not receiving enough power. Luckily, you can press “ok” and won’t get bothered anymore. Doing some research says that ideally you should always use an external power adapter, but plenty of people are using the TV’s power adapter without issues. My initial research also told me that the Fire Stick requires only 1A USB power, but its external power adapter provides 1.8A. Honestly? At this stage I don’t care anymore. Worst case is that the Fire Stick crashes during a system update and won’t start anymore. Again, I stopped caring.

Anyway, afterwards I created a new Amazon account for this stick and an error message kept popping up when trying to install Netflix etc.: “Not possible because account is not charged” (or sth similar…)
It disappeared after I added a credit card to my Amazon account. I also received an invoice from Amazon via email for every free app that I installed. The invoice luckily being 0$.

I’m not really surprised by this “behavior”. If it was my own TV, I would have enough space to use a little TV box which can run my own installation of Android TV or Kodi etc. But because of all these circumstances with the in-laws and their special TV mount, I kinda gave up. Yes Amazon, you can have my data. Yes, please also have my credit card too. The in-laws want to have a smart TV without having any technological smartness themselves, so that is the price “we” are willing to pay.

The Fire Stick remote is working nicely. You can use the TV’s and the Fire Stick’s remote interchangeably, which is nice for the in-laws. Netflix, Youtube, Jellyfin are working nicely. What really bothers me is the home screen. You get bombarded with movie recommendations and there is flashy content everywhere. Yes, please take all my dopamine as well… because this is how we are developing into a global technocratic society.

I hope this odyssey is slowly coming to a finish and the current set-up lasts for more than a year.

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An interesting comment from the Choice team

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And just to clarify, I can’t be certain of the exact model that @bonguz is referring to, but we have tested the following Samsung models:

  • QA65Q70AAWXXY, purchased March 2021
  • QA65Q70TAWXXY, purchased May 2020
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FWIW I have read that last years Samsung Q60 series is sometimes marketed as this years Q70 series and so on, so it is excellent you included the full model and date of purchase as hints it is specific to the model not just the series.

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Hi. I have a Sammy Q70R 75" , and like you, the Wi-Fi performance “appears” abysmal. I had the wifi module replaced under warranty but no improvement.

note that Wifi is not an exact science. On our phones and tablets etc, we don’t even notice most of the “drop-outs” that occur far more frequently than you think, because our devices just ask for a retransmit. I don’t think that the average Wi-Fi access point was really ever intended to stream continuously to a 4K TV.

These drop-outs become a pain with streaming, particularly if you want HD or 4K!

I solved the problem by buying a pair of ethernet over power line adapters, which enables a hard wired connection to your Modem/router.They are branded “PRO-Link”. They have been installed for over a year and drop-outs no longer occur. I don’t have any problems with them “sleeping” when idle.

You could also get a comms tech to install a Cat 5e/6 cable between your modem and the TV - but this might be the more expensive solution.

By way of background, I entered the computer industry as a technician in 1969 (53 years ago), and whilst retired, I still keep abreast of the technology.

Good luck.

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