Routers and Lag

I bought a router for my game room. Since hooking up my Xbox to it, I experience more lag. Is it my imagination or have other people had this experience also?

Do gaming routers help?

How are peoples' experiences with wi-fi and VF5 Online?

This lag business is no good, but I would like to have my 360, Wii, PS3, and laptop hooked up to the internet at the same time without having to switch cables.

Anyone have any suggestions?

 

IMO anything different than going straight to the modem will always produce some lag. The router has to allocate some bandwidth to all your other devices and in the case of a computer it's always worse since you might have friends on IM or you email client downloading an attachment while you're in the middle of a fight, etc.

I can almost feel when I'm playing against someone who's using a router just by the way the lag strikes intermittently as opposed to those players to whom I just have a bad connection for whatever other reason (they might be in Japan or using a 56K modem, etc.)

 

i use a wireless connection to a router and have no issues. i did a bit of research on the whole wired vs wireless connection to router thing and seems there's allot of ignorance on this topic.

most people will say "go wired" with no evidence whatsoever to support why this makes a noticable difference. some guys over at adsl_guide did some tests and found zero difference for online gaming.

 

i use wifi and it lags only sometimes but usually i dont have lag. So im not sure if its me since i get good games in or the other side.

-j

 

A router should not introduce perceptible lag.. A router might add 1-3 MS to the latency a packet experiences..

The reason wired is better than wireless is because wireless is suceptible to interference.. EG a Portable Phone, Microwave. Or other devices (or just weak signal). When the signal goes through,, theres no extra lag.. (Its all going at near the speed of light wired or wireless). PRoblem is when you get a burst of interference.. all those data packets that were being trasnmitted may not get through and this will cause intermittent lag spikes or even disconnects if its bad enough.

 

I think that I will use my Comcast router and just switch the cables as needed. All my consoles will be wired with ethernet cables, so it will be easy to switch. They make gaming routers that might work, but for now this will work. I have a sweet set up.

 

I'm wireless to router and it works fantastic.

 

Glad to hear that playing via wireless connection is okay. Looking forward to playing this online more than ever now!

But I had no idea that the Xbox360 did not have a built-in wireless network adaptor.. and that it was such a pricey accessory.

 

If lag is a concern don't use wireless, you are never going to get the same speed. Make sure your XBOX 360 is set up outside your DMZ, in your router settings. I have a linksys router....

 

It is... about 85-100 bucs..

 

I don't know what to tell you, but I was skeptical as well, but not anymore. The wireless adapter works like a charm! I have a D-Link router. And 8MBs Cable Modem...

But I've compared wired w/ wireless and I can't tell the difference. Well aside from the $90 hole in my pocket /forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/frown.gif

 

evidence?

guys over at adsl_guide did a comparison a while back and said there's no difference for online gaming between wired and wireless.

 

Playing with WLAN produces considerable lag, as there is a lot of packet loss going on when playing wireless. Therefore, it is difficult to keep up a continous upload data stream making ping times lousy and not better than 200 ms. I would not recommend WLAN for VF, or any other game with online capabilities besides downloading stuff. (see Wikipedia)

FreeScotland, could you please do me a favor and do a speedtest over at Speedtest.net, and post your ping time?

 

i get pings of 48-56ms within the uk (yes, that's on speedtest too) and i also get pings of less than 50ms on fatal fury.

where are you getting this "no better than 200ms" claim.....again, i hear allot of hot air from people on this issue but never any hard evidence.

the technology used in wireless routers is similar to that used by the 360s wireless pads...if interference was as big an issue as you claim people's joypad inputs would get missed ect. the amount of data being streamed between the router and xbox is way below the 56mb limits on most routers and therefore interference is negligible.

 

Wireless signal coverage and strength can be affected by many reasons; position of antennas, what brand and what grade, whether it is designed for SOHO / enterprise(big difference), position of the router/AP, distance to end client...some even allow you to boost your signal through its UI. Of coz, setting of channels affects it too. It all makes a difference and the truth is...

It's a luxury...nothing beats cable handsdown.

Akai, I will say unless your place is really huge, 3 rooms away shouldn't be that 'badly' affected...unless the walls are really thick, doors closed and such. If so, oops. Not to mention, were there other PC users latching onto the signal during that time? If so, then your bandwidth is distributed between the users, affecting the speed of xfer.

Of coz, it depends on what brand of wireless router or dedicated AP you have as well.

I've done too many wireless deployment to remember, but one deployment stands out among the many I've done.

School Campus...56 APS...During the POC stage of 2 weeks, it worked beautifully with no hidcups. One fine day out of the blue, no matter what and how we redesigned it, we simply couldn't get the wireless infra to be stable.

So we shut the whole thing down for two weeks and tried to figure out what was doing on....next thing you know, it works just fine without anything done.

Wireless can just be damn weird at times because there can be too many factors involved. We proved we were'nt hacked, there were no DOS attacks, I got a hacking school to try and do a 'ethical hack' haha to prove it. Distance was fine, got our design approved by principal and CCIE guys (even they were lost as to why it didn't worked).

Tech cases were raised with engineers from US working with us around the clock and even they couldn't figure it out. The design and solution worked on other campuses and till date, we still cannot figure out what happened or why it mysteriously worked fine in the end, or so we thought!

Last I heard, the same problems are back again after being fine for 6 months!

 

Wireless is like a cellphone.. Sometimes it works great.. Othertimes its staticy and you get disconnected..

If you have the option I'd plug my xbox into a cable.. It just rules out one more point of failure.

Muhahah i test 17mbit Down,, 11mbit up @ speedtest.net

 

You are providing incorrect information. I am proof of this, it is working BEAUTIFULLY for me. It is PERFECT!

 

You're not proof your anecdotal evidence.

Wireless connection as a whole, are more un-reliable than wired connections. While your individual connection may be perfect. Everyone has different hardware/environmental conditions that could affect their wireless connection. So the best advice is if you have a choice, go wired.

On top of that Wired for the most part is higher bandwidth than wireless. Though in either case its probable that your actual internet connection (cable/DSL/Fiber) is the slowest point.

One way to test.. take a laptop.. Connect to wireless..
From a command prompt:

ping -n 100 http://www.google.com
see how many packets are lost and what the average latency is.

connect to the SAME network, via wired.

ping -n 100 http://www.google.com
See how many packets are lost and what the average latency is.

That'll tell you which is better.

You want low latency and low packetloss