I've had the Portal for 6 months and in that time I've been able to tweak my home network and make improvements so that it reliably works well nearly every time I play it. The biggest change I made initially was that I connected my PS5 to my network via ethernet. This makes a big difference in performance, but that change alone didn't result in a consistent experience. Using ethernet reduces latency and thus makes the games more responsive, but I still got internet connection warnings and quality drops periodically. A few additional changes that I was able to make over the past few months collectively helped a lot, in addition to switching to an ethernet connection.
The first thing that I did was increase my bandwidth. I was getting 100 Mbps down from my fiber optic, and I increased it to 500 Mbps. It subsequently has been increased again to 750 Mbps by my ISP.
The second thing I did was moved the location of one of my mesh routers. I have 3 connection points, and originally I had one on each level of my house. I noticed that the Portal was consistently connecting to the router upstairs, despite there being one on the same level just 20 feet away. I'm mostly just running Alexa devices upstairs, and thus don't really need a strong connection there, so I moved it down to the main level and placed it in my entertainment center in the living room, which is where I sit to play the Portal.
The last thing I did was change some network settings. I identified the Portal on my network and switched it to always be a 5G connection, which is what Sony recommends. The other setting change I did was to have the routers download firmware updates automatically and to have scheduled reboots. What is the first thing you do when network performance is down? You reboot your routers, which nearly always fixes the problem. I now have my routers scheduled to reboot automatically every Friday morning at 3:00 am.
I made all of these changes around the same time, so it is difficult to say for sure which one is helping the most. I suspect moving the router down to the living room so that the Portal can connect to it just a few feet away instead of connecting to it on a whole different level helped the most. Having additional bandwidth never hurts either. I suppose in the end it really doesn't matter which one helped the most. The bottom line is that after making these few and relatively easy changes, the Portal went from working well about 90% of the time to working well nearly 100% of the time.
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