My one biggest Wii-U complaint.

[Viper1]

famousringo said:

Train wreck said:
I live in a townhouse which is more vertical than a single family home and I was able to play the gamepad through the entire house except one portion, it varies depending on your house size

It's not just the size, it's the arrangement, composition and environment.The metal of a ventilation duct or dense materials like stone will interfere with the signal. And I'm guessing that the Wii U uses a modified WiFi spec for data transfer, which means it will operate in the same 2.4 GHz range as nearly every other wireless device. So if your neighbourhood has a lot of other wireless traffic, you won't need to get too far from your console before the noise starts drowning out the signal.

These are problems that all wireless systems face, but because Wii U is trying to transfer high-bandwidth video in real time (compared to buffered video, like a Netflix or Youtube stream), it's especially sensitive to these problems.

It's 802.11n so it can also run in 5 Ghz range.  Not just 2.4.  But we don't know which one is being used for the GamePad.

 

Also wanted to point out that the GamePad could technically be used over Wi-Fi itself meaning you could take your GamePad to Starbucks and use it.  But this would require a network connection rather than the Miracast peer to peer protocol it is using.  The technology is already built in, it would just need a user interface and a few lines of code in the firmware to access a network connection.