[SOLVED] Wifi and wired Issues

[Marc with C]

Hi everyone,

I am new at Tom'sHardware so I want to apologize if this post was already made and also, I am not native english speaker so I may commit some mistakes.

Well, I was having some issues regarding to internet but now it turned a bit incomprehensible .

Just to let you know: - My PC is in my room, my mother's pc is in the study and the router is in the hall.
- My room is at 1 meter from the Study and 2 and a half from the router.
- I checked my router and nobody is connecting to our wifi (there is always the same devices, so I assume nobody is stealing wifi from us)

Well, the point is that I have one of those small usb wi-fi adapters (the cheapest one you can buy on Amazon) and my mother has her usb wifi adapter called MEROSS with an antenna.
Most of the times, when I play games the ping stable between 40ms and 60ms, sometimes it has spikes that goes to 300 but it is usually happens few times.
If the ping is to high for a longer time that I expected I usually connect the ethernet cable (that goes through the corridor till the router) but it actually barely fix the problem, so I decided to play with the wi-fi anyways unless I want to tryhard.

Well, here it goes my incomprehensible situation:

Today I decided to change my wifi adapter by my mother's one, because hers has that antenna and is suppose it will go faster/better.

And after doing a Speedtest with both it is waaaaay better as I expected (with my wifi adapter I have 31 mbps [sad] and with my mother's I can reach the 200 mbps) so I was like "Dude, You made it, prepare to play in the new era".
So after a while I decided to play a match at LoL.... and... I can't barely connect, I am having 3k ms, then I tried with another game and it went exactly the same, I cannot barely connect, and yet the mbps is waaaay better.

Do you know why is it happening?

I hope you could understand what I wrote.

Have a nice day and thx in advance.

Marc

 

[bill001g]

Games do not care about mbps. A game users well under 1mbps so as long as you are faster than that it does not good to add more bandwidth.

What a game cares about is extremely consistent latency....ie ping times. Wifi because it is subject to interference will get random spikes in the latency.

The card with larger antenna might help and it might not. Those tiny USB adapters are very low power and the router has trouble hearing them.

Because you have issues also running on ethernet I would first spend you time to make that work well and then consider the wifi. Run a ping to 8.8.8.8 and see if it is only your machine that get high latency or both. It could be that you are overloading your internet connection or the ISP has trouble. It depends on how large your internet connection is. If it is over 100mbps it is highly unlikely it is overloaded.

 

[Marc with C]

So you mean I should buy a better adapter? That could fix the issue?

I have to say that when I connect the ethernet cable it doesn't get muuuch better but also because I have like a 10 meter cable, do you think that If I get one with 3 meters it will go better?

I don't think the wifi overloads because sometimes we don't use it and the only one who does it is me,

I will be attending for your answer,

Thanks again for your time

Sincerly,

Marc

 

[bill001g]

A ethernet cable that is the maximum 100 meters long will run the same speed as a 10 meter one. Technically it is slightly more but I will let you calculate what fraction of 1ms it takes a signal to go over copper cable at about 2/3 the speed of light.

Because you have trouble on ethernet a different wifi adapter will not help.

Can you run tests on the other pc to see if it is your PC causing this.

'What you can do is first try a constant ping to the router IP. Again do this on ethernet you will always see latency spikes in wifi from time to time. It would be very rare to see any form of ping spike testing this. After that try a constant ping to some common ip like 8.8.8.8. This will see if there is some delay between your house and the server.

 

[Marc with C]

Hi bill001g,

I pinged to the router and to 8.8.8.8,


To the router it takes 1 to 2ms everytime and to the 8.8.8.8 it takes at most 40ms but the normal time is 20ms, both with Wifi.

It seems is all about the internet consistency, do you know if there is any way to fix that?

Thx again dude,

 

[bill001g]

20ms of variation is not going to cause any issues. The problem would be if you see a spike to say 150ms. Even then a few here and there will not cause a impact on a game.

It could be that the path to the game server is different than the 8.8.8.8 ip. I guess you could check to a game server but there is almost nothing you can do to fix it because it likely would be in the game server ISP or some other ISP in the path since your ISP can get to 8.8.8.8 fine.

It could be something with the computer...or more something with games. What you want to do is leave the ping run to 8.8.8.8 in the background cmd window and see what happens when the game claims you have 3k ping times. If you do not see similar delays in the actual ping then the game is telling lies. Although it is strange many people can fix so called network issues by changing video driver settings. The game gets busy running video and delays looking for network data. It then blames the delay on the network itself rather than it not checking to see if there was network data.