Question How can I lower network latency?

[ThatSourMelon]

So I’m part of a competitive overwatch team, I have internet speed that works and is pretty good, but my network latency is pretty bad (side question, is pink and latency the same thing? What’s the difference, there is an option to show latency on overwatch settings but not ping). It’s around 150-250ms, and sometimes on good times it will lower to 80, but at bad times (which is a lot more frequent than good) it goes a little below 500ms. Overwatch is the only program open besides discord. I’m signed up for esports so that’s not going to cut it! I’ve looked into any way I can to lower it, I bought a powerline adapter and I have wired internet, I’m also connected to wireless. Websites are telling me to turn off my firewall, is that safe? Could I just turn it off during competitions? Is there any way I could lower my latency? My router isn’t too old, about 5 years and my internet provider provided it, I have bridge max (its the only option in my area).

 

[jsmithepa]

1. What other people in the house do affects you. If that's an issue I can recommend a router thingy just for this.

2. If you are so serious about latency, u must go ALL ETHERNET, any other method between your PC and the modem will slow u down, period.

 

[ThatSourMelon]

1. What other people in the house do affects you. If that's an issue I can recommend a router thingy just for this.

2. If you are so serious about latency, u must go ALL ETHERNET, any other method between your PC and the modem will slow u down, period.

1. Yes, that may be some of the problem, what is the router thingy?

2. My router is way in the basement, a power line adapter is the best I can do for this. When I connected it I noticed slightly faster speeds and a little lower latency. I heard somewhere that if you are connected to Ethernet and connected to wifi at the same time it increases bandwith and lowers latency, is that true? Or should I go ALL Ethernet?

 

[jsmithepa]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-g2P3R84dw&list=PLpkCKTQ-Mst0MQwJMnkPJ83HHmkCkrQsN&index=8&t=0s

 

[bill001g]

Before you spend money take your pc down to the basement and plug it into the router just to test what the best possible latency you can get. Powerline units should only add a couple ms to the latency compared to a ethernet cable.

Your firewall likely makes no difference and actually does little to protect your pc. The virus/malware protection though is a different story but it also will have no impact on your latency.

In general there is nothing you can do about the latency between your house and the game server. It is mostly a measure of distance and many ISP do not take the most direct path. You could have overload in the network but that is much less common if you live near a big city. Overload of your internet connection coming to your house because of other users in your house could be a issue so you want to test when nobody else is using the network. The only real fix if the problem is other devices in your house is to buy more bandwidth...other than that some agreement needs to be reached as to whose traffic is more important. Someone will not get all the bandwidth they need and generally the person that pays for the connection gets to make the rules. You can enforce a agreement with QoS in many routers but it is nothing magic it just limits some peoples traffic so others get more bandwidth.