How can you keep your ping down?

[(SWGO)Minas_Thirith]

I realize wireless has come a long way, but I have trouble believing it to be as solid as a hard wired connection.
You are looking at either a wireless G router pushing 100mbps on the wired ports and 54mbps wireless or a wireless N router which has Gigabit wired ports (1000mbps) and pushes probably around 130 wireless (with an alleged potential for 300mbps with channel bonding).
The upside of wireless from a data standpoint is...?

http://swgohome.com/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=9

[haasd0gg]

I realize wireless has come a long way, but I have trouble believing it to be as solid as a hard wired connection.
You are looking at either a wireless G router pushing 100mbps on the wired ports and 54mbps wireless or a wireless N router which has Gigabit wired ports (1000mbps) and pushes probably around 130 wireless (with an alleged potential for 300mbps with channel bonding).
The upside of wireless from a data standpoint is...?

http://swgohome.com/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=9

...uh-huh... and look at who moderates that forum

[Flyswamper]

If we are talking about a hotel wireless connection or some hotspot where you are sharing the internet with hordes of other people and the hot-spot owner may be running software/configs to purposely throttle and filter the data ..... then I'd agree my experiences with these type of wireless connections are often far less than desirable.

If, however, you are talking about a home router connected to your ISP then we have a completely new ball game. Haas... you are talking about the download/upload throughput capacity of wireless as compared to wired.

Wireless G ~ 54 mbs
Wireless N ~ ? even more
100mb Ethernet - 100 mbs
GB Ethernet - 1 Gbs

These numbers are kinda irrelevant when you figure that even the slowest one (wireless G) is able to pump data through the system much faster than any typical home internet connection (the DSL box or the cable-modem). Typically your connection to the outside world is throttled to somewhere in the 1 - 25 mb/s speeds. The wireless G can double (or more) this.... So there is no bottleneck there.

But really...all that is kinda beside the point when it comes to gaming and lag. Those numbers talk about how much data can be pumped through the wires/air in a fully-flowing stream of data. Most online games don't come ANYWHERE CLOSE to "filling up the pipes" with continuous data streams that would clog any of these devices. Instead, what gives us trouble in the form of lag is response time between when the data is sent and when it is received. You can have a very limited bandwith but have great response (ping essentially) performance and gaming should be great. Conversely, your provider could let you have 500 mbs sustained throughput to the internet, but if the response/ping times were bad gaming would be impractical.

Which brings one to the question of "do wireless routers" have any noticeable effect on ping / response time? If the signal is extremely weak and there is a lot of re-transmission of data due to signal noise/loss in the system then I can imagine that there might be a noticeable issue. This could happen if you are "stealing" your neighbors internet connection and you are on the edge of the range of the radios.

However, if the radios are fairly close to each other and the signal is strong, there really shouldn't be any significant delay introduced by wireless connection. After all radio waves travel pretty darn fast through the air and the distances involved in almost infinitely small compared to the speed of the signals/waves.

So.... long story made shorter.... yes wireless can be a bad deal if the signal is weak, shared-with-many, or intentionally throttled/filtered in some way. But if you are using a typical home wireless router, my gut instinct tells me that (with an adequate signal strength) there would be zero detectable difference to a gamer.

Those of you that have wireless routers can test.... do a ping to your favorite game server through a wireless connection and then do it through a wired connection from the back of your router. Do something like 100 pings with each method and average the results.... See if there is any clear difference? I would think you would need to repeat the tests several times (or do lots more than 100 pings) to get a reliable answer.

[haasd0gg]

Did you contradict me fly?
I have about enough of you Canucks this month

[(SWGO)Minas_Thirith]

I realize wireless has come a long way, but I have trouble believing it to be as solid as a hard wired connection.
You are looking at either a wireless G router pushing 100mbps on the wired ports and 54mbps wireless or a wireless N router which has Gigabit wired ports (1000mbps) and pushes probably around 130 wireless (with an alleged potential for 300mbps with channel bonding).
The upside of wireless from a data standpoint is...?

http://swgohome.com/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=9

...uh-huh... and look at who moderates that forum

Lols, hes on Xfire every day, call him in But you have to login yourself for that