Wireless Networking and Latency

B

BCO

Honorary Master
Joined
Dec 17, 2004
Messages
13,229
Reaction score
27
Location
Slaapstad
I'm sure this has been discussed before, but Ol' Blue's lazy. I'm about to get ADSL installed at home (gg iBurst) and am considering going with a wireless router rather than have to climb in the roof and reroute all my ethernet cabling (iBurst modem was upstairs at one end of the house, while the phone line, and consequently the ADSL router is at the other end of the house).

HOWEVER, 2 of the machines at home, including mine, are about 20m away from where the router will be and the signal would have to go through 4 walls. I understand that the 802.11g protocol has an effective indoor range of 46m, but that signal is seriously affected by obstacles. Considering that the whole reason I'm getting ADSL is for low latency online gaming, is it counterproductive to be considering a wireless LAN?

Thanks!
 
Lay the cable... wireless is great but for speed/latency/cost just lay the cable...
 
My opinion is get Telkom to install another jack for the phone line you intend to use for ADSL somewhere in the middle of your house (slight monthly increase but i think only R5 or something). Then go wireless. The biggest mistake I ever made was installing ADSL on my fax line, which is only in one room of my house and in the corner. The wireless router works well but not at the furthest reaches of my house. If I had simply put it on my standard phoneline, I could have placed the router in any of several rooms and saved myself alot of stress.

Remember you can still use the phone line with ADSL on it for voice or fax simultaneously.
 
SuperAntMD said:
My opinion is get Telkom to install another jack for the phone line you intend to use for ADSL somewhere in the middle of your house (slight monthly increase but i think only R5 or something).
Click to expand...
or just install another jack yourself and avoid having to pay the beast another R5 a month for nothing.

A wireless network won't really increase your latency at all, or at least that's my experience, mainly because of the short distance. And the speed of a wireless network is fast enough to cope with any sort of internet connection available in SA.

when I ping my router from my computer connected by cable, it gives me a ping of 1ms, when I ping from my notebook, it's usually between 1-2ms, and sometimes 3ms when I'm far away from the router while the signal has to go through 5 walls.

If already have the router, or when you get it before finally deciding on whether or not to wire everything, just connect to the router wirelessly without an internet connection, and check what speed your network connects at and how fast your pings are to the router. That'll be the best way to really check what difference it would make to you.
 
Well thanks for the advice all. In the end I decided to save some money and bought a Billion 5102.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X