Question about wired cable

[personwhoneedshelp]

I've used wireless all my life and I heard cables were a hell of a lot faster, but my router is quite the distance from my desktop. I recently bought a 10m long CAT6 wire, but I heard that the longer the wire, the slower the ping/ latency. I play a lot of online shooters and Ping is very important to me, will this kind of a cable have a big affect? Is it that big of a difference in ping?
Thanks you for any answers!
Not sure if download speeds even matter, but I'll just drop them down here anyway.
Wireless:
Download: 75 mbps
Upload: 100 Mbps
Ping: In games around 25
Wired:
Download: 350 mbps
Upload: 100 Mbps
Ping: 15 - 16 in game
If I had a shorter wire, would there be a big decrease in ping?
Thanks for any help, I'm really bad when it comes to Internet stuff.

 

[InvalidError]

Heh, no, cable length has zero measurable effect as far as LANs are concerned: the speed of light (in fiber, equivalent to the speed of electrical signals in most typical cables) is 200 million meters per second, a 100m long cable would only affect your pings by 0.0005ms compared to a zero-length cable. Your switch/router is orders of magnitude worse and the modem + cable plant + CMTS will be orders of magnitude worse than that still.

 

[personwhoneedshelp]

Thank you! I was worried.

 

[mrmez]

Had a similar discussion a few days ago...

A good wifi connection is really as good as ethernet.
My wifi at work connects at ~900mb/s, MCS index ~7. Swapping to ethernet drops my ping by ~1ms.

 

[Scottray]

A simple napkin calculation is 10m * (1 / 2*10**8 m/s) = 50ns. I'm assuming that a signal will travel down a twisted pair wire at about 2/3 the speed of light. So, if your getting 15 to 16ms pings, you're certainly not going to notice an additional 50ns delay due to 10m cable.

 

[Solandri]

A good wifi connection is really as good as ethernet.
My wifi at work connects at ~900mb/s, MCS index ~7. Swapping to ethernet drops my ping by ~1ms.

While the link speeds for WiFi (the speed at which the router and adapter communicate) are approaching 1 Gbps, about half to two thirds of that is taken up by error correction coding. That's unavoidable when you're transmitting on a shared communications channel. Other signals will appear as noise and interfere with your desired signal. Since you can't predict when the noise will hit, the entire signal needs to be encoded with redundant error correction in order to retrieve the original signal when it gets stomped by a burst of noise. I regularly connect to my 802.11ac router at 866 Mbps, but actual file transfer rates are usually around 30-35 MB/s. Not the 108 MB/s you'd expect if all the bandwidth were being used.

By comparison, when I use a Gigabit ethernet cable, file transfers usually go at about 110-125 MB/s. Ethernet cable only picks up noise by acting as an antenna, and uses twisted pairs to cancel that noise out. The end result being very little net noise and communications can proceed at very close to the theoretical max of 1 Gbps (125 MB/s).

I expect this will start to change in the next 5-10 years. Some of the new WiFi technologies being developed implement beamforming. You use multiple antennas as if they were a phased array antenna, basically making it directional (the direction it's pointing at is determined by software, based on which order you analyze the signals from the multiple antennas). In this way, a static WiFi antenna in your laptop could be "aimed" at your router. Making the signals directional doesn't just improve signal strength; it also reduces noise (since noise not from the direction the antenna is aimed is reduced). That'll let us get away with less error correction coding, which would allow actual WiFi throughput to come closer to the theoretical max despite other devices producing noise.

 

[InvalidError]

A good wifi connection is really as good as ethernet.

Not really: a wireless connection has extra overhead due to the RF modulation and demodulation, extra overhead due to forward error correction, extra overhead from transmission to the AP being on scheduled time slots so whenever your PC needs to transmit something, it needs to wait for its assigned time slot to begin, much slower usable signaling rates, etc. Under ideal conditions, wireless has ~100X more PHY-layer latency than a typical wired 1GbE connection which has been standard in PCs for the past 10+ years.

In a neighborhood where every mosquito seems to have its own AP (I see 3-5 APs on every channel that I can set my router to), wireless is nearly hopeless and cannot be expected to deliver any sort of reliability.