How To Improve Ping In Games?

[KingSaif]

Hi I'm going to build a gaming PC and it will be placed in my room, however, I only get 3-4 bars and 80+ ping in here. My room is downstairs, the router is upstairs (verizon FiOS), I share the house with my family, so there are a lot of people in the house, and the wifi is very unreliable (I jump from 80 ping to 150 randomly, the bars go from 3 to 4 sometimes to even 2)..I was thinking of buying an ethernet cable cat5e 100ft (50 is not enough) and drill a hole run it through the ceiling to my PC, will that improve and stabilize my ping to 50 or under? I really can't play with anything over 55... I don't care about up/down speeds, just ping 😛 thanks a lot guys

 

[Lucias OKeefe]

Plug ehternet cable in, tell people to stop watching youtube while you play. This is the only way for improvement besides troubleshooting with your ISP.

 

[bill001g]

The best you can get is going to be with a ethernet cable. You may or may not be able to get the times you want. Ping when everything is working well pretty much measures the distance from you to location. Sometime is is not fixable it is a long way from say India to the USA. Maybe you get 150ms if you are lucky.

 

[bicycle_repair_man]

What device are you pinging? If it's the modem/router, then 80ms is pretty high. If it's a device on the WAN (Internet) then it's not bad at all.

Whilst a network cable can certainly improve reliability, it may not necessarily improve Internet connectivity. You may still be bottlenecked by your ISPs download speed or the other family members. You say that you don't care about upload/download speed, but that's exactly what you should be looking at. A ping test only says so much, and isn't a reliable way to determine Internet connectivity.

 

[KingSaif]

well this is all disappointing news...so do I just have to move my PC out of my room? or should I buy an extender or something? :/ if ethernet doesn't work tho i doubt that will

and btw we have verizon fios and I think it's 25/25 or something, not sure, but I do know that when I'm under the router or a little away from it (1st floor), I get 5 bars ALL the time. when I move to my room, it drops to 3-4 and sometimes even 2.. I play BF4 and only in NA servers (I'm in NY), and i can't deal with pings above 55..

 

[bicycle_repair_man]

You should determine where the bottleneck lies and take it from there. If you have a slow download speed and/or other devices hogging the bandwidth, your only option is to pay for a faster connection (or ask everyone to disconnect). If the connection is slow even when nothing else is connected, then you should look at the quality of the connection between your computer and the router/modem.

If you follow a process of elimination, you'll get to the source. That's how most network flow problems are investigated.

 

[KingSaif]

@bicycle ok thanks but I thought verizon FiOS had good reliable internet, so i don't think they are the problem..isn't it just distance from me and my router? if this is the case, connecting a cat5e cable would grant me 100% access right and lower my ping?

right now I'm getting a constant 4 bars which translates to "excellent" and I would assume decent ping in BF4.. but then again this is morning when a lot of people are not on their devices (phones, laptops), so that may be why..

 

[bicycle_repair_man]

I can't speak for Verizon as I'm in the UK, but from looking at their website, FiOS is a fibre link to the home with a minimum download speed of 25Mbps. That's plenty for online gaming, but if other people are streaming HD video, it may begin to struggle.

Try a download/upload speed test when the network is busy and when it's quiet. If the speed remains approximately the same, download speed isn't the root cause. I'd then be looking at the connection to the router or the router itself.

 

[KingSaif]

the speeds prob won't remain the same 🙁 then what? I can just move this desk to the living room but that's extremely inconvenient because I like my privacy.
i was looking wired vs wireless for online gaming (ping) and people are saying it barely makes a difference, it just makes ur internet more reliable.. if this is the case, will i always have the best ping I can possibly get at a consistent rate when wired up? lets say in my room where my PC is located I can get a maximum ping of 50ms in bf4 when no one else is using the internet, but then when others are using (i have a full house), my ping drops significalty to like 90+ and then it lags, will a wired connection from the router to my PC fix this and grant me the lowest ping possible all the time? sorry if i sound like i'm repeating myself I'm confused and not familiar with internet connectivity

 

[bicycle_repair_man]

Switching from a wireless to a wired connection could improve connection speed depending on how many devices use the wireless network. If a lot of devices are connected wirelessly, that connection can become saturated, so I'd certainly say it's worth a shot.

If the download speed is significantly lower when the network is busy, then your WAN connection is saturated. The only option here is to pay for a faster connection. Your ISP may also throttle the connection at peak times, but if that were the case, everyone would be affected.

 

[KingSaif]

@bicycle thanks for all the help man, I think I may try out wired and if it doesn't help much, I'll either cope with the decent ping in my room or just move it outside..