What is the ping of a Wireless B network?

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bobsaget

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jan 24, 2004
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I'm thinking of going wireless with my linksys wireless 802.11b router.


Right now, wired, I get pings of about 63 on Halo and other games. What would it be with wireless? Or what equivalent will it be? Same? 100? 200?


Thank you! ;)
 
The router is far faster and has much lower latency than your internet connection. Even the lowest grade router will almost not affect your ping. However, low-grade routers tend to not function properly in a gaming environment.

Also, may I ask why you're choosing B? G is minimally more expensive for much better performance. It will last you longer into the future, not to mention that the G routers generally are of a higher quality to begin with.
 
Your Mileage May Very - very true in this case.

802.11b has a theoretical max connection rate of 11Mbit/sec - which equals out to you being able to download at 1.375MB/sec. However, in real world applications, you normally don't see a connection of 11Mbit unless you're sitting next to the router. You'll probably see around 6 or 7 megabits - depending upon distance, walls, wall material, etc.

802.11g has a theoretical max connection rate of 54Mbit/sec - much faster, and it's downwards compatible with 802.11b (so your old wireless kit can still get online through the 802.11g access point).

As far as your ping times go, you hopefully shouldn't notice a difference compared to being wired into the router, but due to the nature of wireless, you may experience a bit slower performance, but not by much.
 
Bandwidth isn't going to matter for your pings. Not here anyway. You'll only introduce latency if your client to AP association is not good. In other words, if your wireless workstation is getting a poor signal strength (or more importantly if your signal to noise ratio is bad) then the client will be forced to resend packets, which will definitely hurt your pings. Properly setup a wireless LAN will give you identical pings to a wired one. It may add 1 or 2 ms to pings realistically. If not setup correctly then yeah, you could see higher pings.

If your never going to do anything more than internet browsing over your wireless LAN then .11b is fine for most circumstances but I agree. .11g is not much more expensive. Might as well give yourself a path to upgrade your existing .11b clients. If you don't have any then .11g is a no brainer. Just doesn't cost enough more to make it a difficult choice.
 
Alright thanks guys! I am only sitting between 1 wall and 20 feet away from this router. My family has a laptop on this same network and even through two walls and about 25 feet, it still gets 100% reception.


Thanks ;)
 
If you have a utility to measure signal quality, something like Netstumbler installed on that machine, then you should look at that as well. Signal quality, or more accurately Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) is as important and generally more important than signal strenght. At 100 signal strength it sounds like your in pretty good shape but you could still have a very strong signal but poor SNR and be affected, possibly significantly.
 
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