Question Hamstrung by WiFi. Need Suggestions...

[Sir_Asheron]

Alright so i'll try to keep it brief. For whatever reason my house doesnt have active CAT5/6 ports except in one room downstairs (where the router is). Its not terribly far from my PC but there are multiple walls in the way. My old build was on a x570 ASUS TUF board and it was barely* getting enough signal for me to game. New build is on a B650 Aorus Elite AX and I constantly get large ping spikes for 3-4 seconds at a time. So far have only played Tarkov and Fifa but its bad enough that fifa is unplayable and its a major headache in Tarkov. I'll have normal ping and then shoot up to 300+ and this happens pretty frequently. Dont know why the newer board gets worse signal but there you have it

Anyways...I dont want to run a 200 foot ethernet cable up my stairs so I'm wondering what you guys think my best/cheapest option would be. My initial thoughts were:

1. Get a better wifi card and/or antenna
2. Get a wifi extender
3. Get a new router that is wifi6 compatible. Current one is a NetGear Nighthawk thats about 2-3 years old

I'm really not trying to spend more than $100 and would love to hear some expert opinions on potential solutions. Thanks!

Edit: Its worth noting that I do get 4 bars on my PC and for whatever reason I get less ping spikes on the non-5G wifi. I have also updated my motherboard with the latest wifi drivers.

 

[punkncat]

Is your basement on a finished ceiling or drop tile/unfinished?

Is the PC on the floor directly above the basement?

If you can get to the floor of the above, I would run a network cable in the wall. You might also find that the phone lines are ran on network cable, but pairs only used for phone service. Assuming you don't use landline and also that the phone run isn't a long daisy chain, you might be able to convert from phone to data.

 

[bill001g]

If you have coax cables in both rooms you can consider MoCA. It can get full 1gbit speeds.

Maybe consider powerline networks. These devices might be slower than your wifi but the latency is going to be much more stable. Many people get 130mbps or so on powerline but it depends on your house. The speed though doesn't matter for actually playing a game. Most online games use less than 1mbps. It would only matter when you were downloading the game and I guess if the wifi was faster you could switch back just for downloads.

Wifi6 will likely cost you lot of money and make no difference. Wifi6 was a great disappointment for most people. The key difference was it could use 160mhz radio bands but because of many things a lot of people could not use it.

Wifi6e maybe, kinda unlikely though, could make a difference. Wifi6e can run on the 6ghz radio band and there are many more channels which greatly reduces the chance of interference from neighbors wifi. Problem is 6ghz does not go through walls as easily as 2.4 and 5ghz.

If you already get 4 bars your antenna are fine and no so called extender will increase the signals. It is likely it is the very common problem that you are getting interference from other wifi devices both inside and outside your house. No way to fix this,pay all your neighbors to move away . Wifi is massively overcrowded.

Pretty much what you are experiencing is exactly why they say you should never play online games on wifi. Online game are pretty much the only application that does not tolerate the latency spikes and wifi because of its fundamental design will get latency spikes.

 

[punkncat]

^ In relation to crowded WiFi conditions, you can download an app to your phone which will show what bands/channels are in use from which you should be able to move to one with less traffic. When some folks moved across the street from me a couple of years ago, IDK what router (etc) they were using, but it messed my WiFi up significantly until I changed channel.

 

[bill001g]

^ In relation to crowded WiFi conditions, you can download an app to your phone which will show what bands/channels are in use from which you should be able to move to one with less traffic. When some folks moved across the street from me a couple of years ago, IDK what router (etc) they were using, but it messed my WiFi up significantly until I changed channel.

Worth a try I guess but the modern wifi equipment is a hog. People will have mesh systems in their house that attempt to use every possible channel.
Wifi7 is only going to compound this because in addition to using twice the bandwidth on the 6g radio it will attempt to bond the 2.4 and 5g radios. So now a single end device will pretty much attempt to use all the available bandwidth.

The tools like that unfortunately do not show which radios have the most actual usage the only show the number of routers. Years ago I had a router that let you put in multiple SSID. I used to put like 50 in one channel to scare other people and routers into selecting other channels.

But there is nothing to lose trying it so I agree see if changing the wifi channel make a difference.

 

[JohnMGotts]

Try forcing it to run on the 2.4 Ghz band