My Controller Is Perfect In The Living Room And Terrible In The Bedroom

Distance is the same, so this is interference rather than range, and a room-dependent difference means something in that room is occupying the band.

Bluetooth and 2.4GHz Wi-Fi share the same spectrum, and so do a long list of ordinary household devices. The ones that cause this most often, roughly in order of how frequently we see them: a Wi-Fi router or mesh node in the room, especially within a metre or two of the console; a smart speaker or display, which are constantly transmitting; a wireless mouse or keyboard dongle plugged into the same machine; a baby monitor; a microwave on the other side of a wall; and USB 3 devices, which are not radios at all but leak broadband noise right across 2.4GHz. A USB 3 external drive or hub next to a console or a Bluetooth adapter is a genuinely common and very under-appreciated cause.

The approach that works is elimination rather than theory. Turn off or unplug one suspect at a time and re-run the range test after each, giving it thirty seconds to settle. It takes ten minutes and you will almost always find a single culprit rather than a vague combination.

Two specifics worth doing first because they are the highest-yield. Move the router or mesh node at least two metres from the console if one is in the room, and if your router broadcasts 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, try switching it to channel 1 or 11 rather than whatever it auto-selected. Second, unplug any USB 3 device from the machine or console temporarily, which costs nothing and resolves a surprising share of cases.

If you find nothing, there is one more possibility: the walls. A bedroom wall with foil-backed insulation, or a mirror with a metallic backing, reflects 2.4GHz and can create a dead spot at one particular position even at close range. Moving the console or your seat by half a metre is a useful test for that, because a reflection problem moves with position while an interference problem does not.