Will Powerline adapter help to reduce ping?

[btr999]

My pc is connecting on wifi. I am using this adapter.
http://us.dlink.com/products/connect/ac1900-wi-fi-usb-adapter/
I am looking for some possible ways to reduce my ping connection to other regions. For example, connect to US, I get 150-160ms around 12am. But it goes up to 170-180ms during daytime.
Due to restriction, I am not able to install LAN cable so I am looking at getting a powerline adapter. However, I am not certain if it helps to achieve better result than my current wireless adapter. I appreciate any input.
For additional info, my connection speed is 1gbps fibre broadband, down ~900mbps, up ~400mbps.

 

[rhysiam]

Open a command prompt and ping the IP address of your router. A good wifi should just be a few ms, with possibly up to 20-30ms with very high wifi load. At best powerline will reduce the latency on that hop to 1-2ms. So at best, you can only improve your ping by the difference. I suspect the vast, vast majority of your ping will be between your router and the internet servers, rather than on your home network. Unfortunately, unless your ISP is providing a shoddy connection for you, there's very little you can do to improve the latency of the Internet.

Where are you located? If you're far away from the US, you're going to get high latency and there's just nothing you can do about it.

For example, I'm on Fibre broadband here in Australia. My ping to Google (AU) is a rock solid 7-8ms, my ping to any US server is a rock-solid 215-220ms. Unfortunately it just takes around 200ms for packets to get routed from Australia to the US and back again. There's absolutely nothing I can do about that.

 

[azaran]

Powerline "should" help with that. I say "should" because powerlines performance is dictated by the wiring in your home. If the wiring is good, you'll get much better performance than wireless gives you. If it's bad... well it could range from worse to better than wireless. It's not going to be as fast as wiring up ethernet cables, but it should help with latency and overall speed. However if your in the US and getting those kind of pings, it sounds like you have an issue with router or on the ISP side of things. Granted a really crap wifi connections can get horrid pings too, but for in country servers, that kind of latency issue tends to be due to wiring coming in to your home or your router/modem.

For a good adapter, go with a current generation model, as the AV2 standard is a marked improvement. One thing to keep in mind is, like gas mileage on a car, Powerline manufactures list lab speeds in ideal setups not actual speeds from the real world. Also read up on the proper setup for powerline, as it's a bit picky about how and what it's plugged in to.

A good article for current generation models
http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-powerline-networking-kit/

 

[rhysiam]

Powerline "should" help with that. I say "should" because powerlines performance is dictated by the wiring in your home. If the wiring is good, you'll get much better performance than wireless gives you. If it's bad... well it could range from worse to better than wireless. It's not going to be as fast as wiring up ethernet cables, but it should help with latency and overall speed. Go with a current generation model, as the AV2 standard is a marked improvement. One thing to keep in mind is, like gas mileage on a car, Powerline manufactures list lab speeds in ideal setups not actual speeds from the real world. Also read up on the proper setup for powerline, as it's a bit picky about how and what it's plugged in to.

A good article for current generation models
http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-powerline-networking-kit/

But OP is specifically saying "other regions", and citing 150-160ms ping, which isn't at all unreasonable for an inter-continental ping. A decent wifi connection won't have more than a few ms ping anyway, so cable vs wifi vs powerline... it's all just buying a few ms here or there which is basically irrelevant in the scheme of things. It's like re-paving your driveway to improve your commute to work. Even if you can drive 3 times as fast up your driveway, it's just not going to make any noticeable difference.

OP - can I encourage you to use ping to check out the latency on your home network first. If it's just a few ms, which it probably is, then your internal network is absolutely fine and the latency (=high ping) is between your Router and the remote server.

 

[azaran]

Eh the ping thing really depends on your setup. I was helping a client yesterday with a wifi setup and they were getting anywhere between 12-80 ping depending on the test and wifi setup. Going with non wifi, it was a consistent 12ms, all testing through the same service. A crappy connection can come from more than just the ISP, but that is usually the first place I'd look. As for region, I'm assuming they're from out of the US, but I know a lot of gamers in the US that go for foreign servers, so it's hard to assume which region without the OP explicitly stating.

 

[sizzling]

I use power line adapters for this reason (UK) based. Most of my gaming went from a ping of 60-100 to 20-30. So yes power line adapter can help but it will depend on what is causing the delay in the first place.

 

[rhysiam]

That's why OP should ping the router. Leave a ping -t running in the background while gaming and look at the results. That'll tell you exactly what the ping on the local network is. A good powerline setup should get that down to a few ms. So OP can make an informed decision as to whether the ____ [insert local network ping here] is worth spending the money to reduce that to a few ms.

OP, if you want a more thorough diagnosis, fire up a command prompt and enter this command...

ping -n 1200 {ROUTER IP ADDRESS} > pinglog.log

That will set of 1200 pings, lasting 20 minutes, to your router, and save the results in a log file. Fire up your game and play while the ping runs in the background, it's a tiny amount of traffic so won't make any difference whatsoever. After the 20 minutes open up the logfile (should be under c:\users\{YourUserName}) and you can see what your ping looks like. As I said above, a good powerline setup should get that to a few ms, so if it's significantly more than that, you know what a powerline solution would save you.

My guess is it'll be a few ms anyway, so there's no benefit of going to a powerline, but that's just a guess, I could be totally wrong. That ping will tell you.

 

[azaran]

That's why OP should ping the router. Leave a ping -t running in the background while gaming and look at the results. That'll tell you exactly what the ping on the local network is. A good powerline setup should get that down to a few ms. So OP can make an informed decision as to whether the ____ [insert local network ping here] is worth spending the money to reduce that to a few ms.

OP, if you want a more thorough diagnosis, fire up a command prompt and enter this command...

ping -n 1200 {ROUTER IP ADDRESS} > pinglog.log

That will set of 1200 pings, lasting 20 minutes, to your router, and save the results in a log file. Fire up your game and play while the ping runs in the background, it's a tiny amount of traffic so won't make any difference whatsoever. After the 20 minutes open up the logfile (should be under c:\users\{YourUserName}) and you can see what your ping looks like. As I said above, a good powerline setup should get that to a few ms, so if it's significantly more than that, you know what a powerline solution would save you.

My guess is it'll be a few ms anyway, so there's no benefit of going to a powerline, but that's just a guess, I could be totally wrong. That ping will tell you.

^ A very good suggestion. Best to test you current setup to see where the fault lies before you buy new hardware.