It sounds counterintuitive, I know. Usually the main concern is whether your Wi-Fi is holding back your home theater, not the other way around. Bad Wi-Fi performance can after all interrupt audio and video streams, or force them down to lower resolutions and bitrates. If you’re lucky enough to have wireless surround sound, disruptions can lead to sync problems, or satellite speakers dropping out entirely.
You do have to be mindful, though, of just how your TV is behaving on your network if you want other devices to operate smoothly. This can be critical if your house is full of smart home accessories — in a worst-case scenario, you could find some accessories being bumped offline. This should all make more sense shortly.
Why is your smart TV a potential bottleneck?
The vagaries of home networks
There are a few ways in which a TV can become a burden, the most obvious being raw bandwidth consumption. Streaming a video at 1080p resolution doesn’t consume much data, even with HDR (high dynamic range) active. But once you step up to 4K, you need a minimum of 25Mbps (megabits per second), and ideally 50Mbps or more to prevent any buffering or artifacts. Any modern router should be capable of handling a 4K stream — but if other people are trying to watch video, play games, or download large files, your Twin Peaks binge could be limiting the bandwidth available to them. A movie or game download could take many minutes longer to finish.
One of the underlying issues here is that routers assign devices to specific bands. Wi-Fi 6 routers have 2.4 and 5GHz bands, while Wi-Fi 6E and 7 add a third option, 6GHz. Naturally, as more devices pile into a particular band, bandwidth may need to be split.
Any modern router should be capable of handling a 4K stream — but if other people are trying to watch video, play games, or download large files, your Twin Peaks binge could be limiting the bandwidth available to them.
Fortunately, many devices support multiple bands, such as your phone or laptop. That allows them to flip as necessary to deal with range or congestion hurdles. Some accessories have no choice but to operate on a particular band, however, most notably smart home accessories like smart bulbs or security cameras. When they’re competing with your TV, they can potentially lose the battle, suffering reduced performance. It’s unlikely that they’ll be kicked offline, but that’s not impossible.
Compounding the situation is that TV makers tend to skimp on Wi-Fi specs, for instance using Wi-Fi 6 despite Wi-Fi 6E having been around since 2021. And if your TV is several years old, it may be stuck with Wi-Fi 5, originally known as 802.11ac. That’s limited exclusively to 5GHz, and lacks many other advancements made to keep networks operating smoothly.
You’re in serious trouble if your router is limited to Wi-Fi 5, incidentally. Often, that technology starts to struggle past 30 or so simultaneous connections. Once the limit is hit, older connections will get dropped to make way for new ones, a problem I’ve dealt with personally. It’s not a threat if the only devices in your home are your TV, a couple of phones, and a couple of computers — once you add smart home accessories into the mix, however, it’s surprisingly easy to bash your head against Wi-Fi 5’s ceiling.
What can you do to alleviate issues with your TV?
Some simple and not-so-simple fixes
The simplest solution, in many cases, is an Ethernet cable. This takes your TV completely out of the wireless spectrum, where most of your other devices are probably operating. Don’t worry — while your TV is still going to consume router bandwidth, even Wi-Fi 6 can handle up to 9.6Gbps in total. As a bonus, Ethernet is largely immune to range or interference issues on the scale of the average home, and most jacks support up to 1Gbps (gigabit per second). That can be two or three times as fast as real-world Wi-Fi connections. You’ll want a Cat 5e cable at a minimum, preferably Cat 6 for the sake of futureproofing.
The greatest obstacle is usually the distance to your router. If your router isn’t close to your TV, you may need an extremely lengthy cable, and some way of securing it out of the way so people don’t trip on it. A router in another room or floor can render this approach completely impractical in some cases, or at least more trouble than it’s worth.
There are alternatives. One that’s free but potentially complicated is forcing devices onto specific bands — you might put your TV on 5 or 6GHz, for example, leaving the 2.4GHz band open for devices that really need it. To do this, though, you not only need to set up separate SSIDs (network IDs) for each band if you haven’t already done so, but go into the settings for each device and assign them to the right network. That can be tedious, and in some instances impossible, as it often is with mesh routers. This may additionally prevent some devices from talking to each other when they have to.
Ethernet takes your TV completely out of the wireless spectrum, where most of your other devices are probably operating.
If your TV is stuck with Wi-Fi 5 or no Ethernet port to speak of, it may be time to look into an add-on media streamer. Any add-on worth buying in 2026 will at least have Wi-Fi 6, improving efficiency, and giving you the choice of flipping between two bands. Wi-Fi 6E and 7 are better still, of course. Be prepared to spend more if you want a streamer with a built-in Ethernet jack — companies like Apple and Roku tend to reserve that for their most expensive models.
There is a roundabout way to add Ethernet to a TV without springing for a Roku Ultra or a top-end Apple TV 4K. If you buy the proper Ethernet adapter, you should be able to get a working internet connection by plugging it into one of your TV’s USB ports. The reason you might still want an add-on streamer is speed — some TVs are still stuck with USB 2.0, which is capped at 480Mbps. That’s fast enough for 4K HDR, but no better than Wi-Fi, making it a little redundant. You won’t be able to take full advantage of gigabit Ethernet without connecting via USB 3.0 or later.
One final but very expensive aid is switching as many Wi-Fi-based smart home accessories as possible over to Thread or Zigbee models. You’ll need some sort of device that can act as a Zigbee hub or Thread border router — but if you’ve got a dozen Wi-Fi bulbs in your house, you’ll be able to shrink the number of router connections they use from 12 down to one.
I suppose the positive news in all of this is that in a few years, all of this should be a moot point. TVs based on Wi-Fi 5 are a dying breed, and soon enough, TV makers will look very stingy if they don’t offer at least Wi-Fi 6E, given Wi-Fi 7’s growing footprint in homes.
