How Playing on Wi-Fi Hurts Your Game

Well, not going to argue your data, but all i can do is give my experience in the home and out in the field. Have had zero complaints from people, and as i said, i can game on my steam link without any noticeable lag. However, when using wifi with my steam link, i get lag.
No, i'm not saying it's not a good solution, it just has some drawbacks to using ethernet so it shouldn't be the first choice especially for gamers (though it also impacts protocols like smb, if you need to operate on large #s of small files). We have dead spots in our old house where i've tested powerline only to find they were on different circuits. After I installed a bridge capacitor, the latency made small file operations a bit annoying but for streaming, it's not latency dependent nor would things like web browsing. The Moca solution sounds like it would work in our current house since we had Comcast wire up every room and could cover the farther parts, though I'm not super enthused about their 3.6ms published latency. Different houses, different spectrum, different solutions.
 
if you're doing any multiplayer gaming especially on pc you should get rid of the wireless.
 
I've tried a many occasions to get rid of the wires in my house (normally every time I upgrade my router) and can never get acceptable gaming performance out of wireless. The PS4 is the worst, no matter how strong the signal is, it's horrible to game wirelessly in any fast paced games. I can get amazing data transfer rates, but gaming performance isn't acceptably good. As an avid Street Fighter player I can tell you that in the community it is considered bad form to play wirelessly in the due to this. Perhaps for some games wireless works okay, but for fighting games it absolutely does not work well enough. Hopefully this changes soon.
 
I've tried a many occasions to get rid of the wires in my house (normally every time I upgrade my router) and can never get acceptable gaming performance out of wireless. The PS4 is the worst, no matter how strong the signal is, it's horrible to game wirelessly in any fast paced games. I can get amazing data transfer rates, but gaming performance isn't acceptably good. As an avid Street Fighter player I can tell you that in the community it is considered bad form to play wirelessly in the due to this. Perhaps for some games wireless works okay, but for fighting games it absolutely does not work well enough. Hopefully this changes soon.

Could be any number of factors that effect this that is not related to WiFi in it self. You probably have a poor connection in one direction, it doesn't matter how good the signal is from the router/AP if the device has a shitty output signal, high directional gain can help this, but only so much. Another factor is other WiFi devices on the network/channel.
 
I bet the same ping on 2.4 and 5 so I'm not sure what's wrong with their setup.

The only latency that matters is spikes, and if you have those to any meaningful frequency/degree, its your ISP or router. A proper wireless setup will not spike more often than a wired one.

I have "TWC" and have had latency spikes for years, even direct to modem. That's a far bigger concern than 3ms extra average ping.
 
For what its worth... when i work from home I connect to my employer through VPN and run a cisco softphone. When i connect using my wifi (laptop to netgear nighthawk with full signal strength) occasionally my calls cut out briefly. When connected over powerline, its a lot more consistent. Mind you this is with no one else in the household competing for the same internet connection.
 
For what its worth... when i work from home I connect to my employer through VPN and run a cisco softphone. When i connect using my wifi (laptop to netgear nighthawk with full signal strength) occasionally my calls cut out briefly. When connected over powerline, its a lot more consistent. Mind you this is with no one else in the household competing for the same internet connection.

Signal strength is only one direction, from the router to the laptop, the signal going back however can be weak, as laptops tend to have lower output and lower gain antenna. You also need to do a site survey to find out what other channels are in the area and do a proper setup. If you are getting drops, that would suggest some sort of interference going on that might need to be avoided, or you are on the max end of range.

The linked test shows powerline to be even worse than WiFi if it's all to be believed, so your results should be worse on powerline.
 
Signal strength is only one direction, from the router to the laptop, the signal going back however can be weak, as laptops tend to have lower output and lower gain antenna. You also need to do a site survey to find out what other channels are in the area and do a proper setup. If you are getting drops, that would suggest some sort of interference going on that might need to be avoided, or you are on the max end of range.

The linked test shows powerline to be even worse than WiFi if it's all to be believed, so your results should be worse on powerline.

I've found that neighborhood interference is pretty common, lots of people buy similar routers with the same default channels and they never change them. That turns everybody into one large collision domain even if they're on a different SSID (which is really just protocol level isolation in the shared channel) and if one person tosses in an old 802.11g or 802.11b device into the mix on that channel, it can eat a lot of your bandwidth since other faster devices nearby have to wait for the old guy in the model T to limp down the street so their ferrari can go next. Some people in my neighborhood have some really old gear. Toss in some microwaves that leak into the Wifi Spectrum, causing havoc (My in-law's panasonic inverter microwave is really bad) and cause interference, plus dense housing and you have a recipe for spikes that can be significantly different from one household to another. Thus more reason to use wired when possible, but I regularly game over wifi if it's co-op or not competitive play. If we rubber band in co-op it's just something to laugh about.
 
Who pings 3ms to their router via wifi? Very odd article.. I'm not sure what pingplotter is being used for either, although I did kinda skip over the article a bit. Ping plotter measures latency to each hop.. but in this case, there should be no difference between wifi vs Ethernet vs powerline for anything past the router as at that point it is essentially just an ICMP packet on the internet. Also an issue since testing ICMP across the internet isn't something you should rely on since many devices have low priority for ICMP. The beauty of ping plotter though is that you can test tcp protocol across the internet, so if you know the port of the game, you could test that to the destination and it will give you an accurate latency.

Anyways, unless you are a pro-gamer, powerline, wifi, whatever is just fine. If you are just a hardcore gamer, I could see why you would want to use Ethernet, but probably even more important is having a ballin PC and a gaming monitor.
 
Who pings 3ms to their router via wifi? Very odd article.. I'm not sure what pingplotter is being used for either, although I did kinda skip over the article a bit. Ping plotter measures latency to each hop.. but in this case, there should be no difference between wifi vs Ethernet vs powerline for anything past the router as at that point it is essentially just an ICMP packet on the internet. Also an issue since testing ICMP across the internet isn't something you should rely on since many devices have low priority for ICMP. The beauty of ping plotter though is that you can test tcp protocol across the internet, so if you know the port of the game, you could test that to the destination and it will give you an accurate latency.

Anyways, unless you are a pro-gamer, powerline, wifi, whatever is just fine. If you are just a hardcore gamer, I could see why you would want to use Ethernet, but probably even more important is having a ballin PC and a gaming monitor.

As I said above, they tested the WiFi in the "FAR" location they do their router tests in that only the best routers reach into, meaning WiFi signal was spotty at best, they also used a USB WiFi dongle rather than the WiFi card in the laptop or a PCIe card in a desktop, they really did all they could to cause the WiFi to have the worst performance possible and even then only got a 3ms higher ping in one test, others were closer to 1ms.
 
I just finished wiring my 30 year old, 2 story house. It was a giant pain in the ass, but it was worth it.


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I have no issues with my PCI-E wifi card and Ac-1750 router. Not once did I ever have dropped connection.

I also tried playing fast paced games like CS:GO online, and my connection was never an issue more than my total lack of skill was.

If I really have issues with them, I am not noticing them, the most online gaming I do these days are purely ARPG so critical timing is not an issue.

I haven't bothered with cable because I moved my computer 3 times in the last 5 years, and each time the location was moved enough that I would require a new cable set up to the new location. Basically, not happening.

If I was in a multi storied house that I will live in a more permanent basis, I'll get the cables done. In a single floor apartment? Far more trouble than its worth.

Advantage of the 5Ghz frequency is that their signal drop quite quickly with distance and obstacles, so the AC signal you will see in your own apartment is usually yours, you won't see anyone else's and they won't see yours.
 
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