Latency and Bandwidth

[c.j]

Another question for the IT gurus, and forgive me in advance if I use the wrong term or what ever.

I have an nbn connection and last night on LFS I noticed that my ping whilst in the game lobby was above 100. Probably cause\ing a few issues when cornering with the others around me and AC/Pcars is going to require a better connection than I was on last night.
I was connected via the powerline adapter in our lounge room and I know that is already throttling the connection a bit but when I build a rig for the wheel I will have it right near my modem/router.

My question is if other devices are on the network will they take bandwidth away from my connection even if not being used? Is that even the right way to ask that haha. We have probably 10 odd devices in the house connected at any time but things like ipads and phones connect automatically. Should I disable the wifi on these devices when having a session with you gents?

Connection is 50/20 nbn. The router says 300mbps, the lan port on my laptop is 100mbps and wifi is 144mbps. It uses some fancy pants shiz where it says it uses both wifi and wired but for the sake of stability when I have this in the shed I will just use the wired connection.

I looked into buying a super duper router but have been advised against it if I am just going to plug my gaming computer straight in to the modem/router thingy optus provided. Had to go optus as iinet/internode had no spots left in our area and pass on Telstra. Should I bump the connection to 100/50? I don't want to if it's not needed but these new sims are much more complex than LFS and I don't want to be the one timing out mid session or affecting anyone else night.

[norbs]

The amount of available bandwidth they take away if not in use should be fuck all. Especially on 50/20 NBN.

I have experienced nothing but pain with those mains power connection things. Set one up for a guy here and it is the only connection he has issues with Netflix. Even the WiFi seems to work better.

Once you plug into the modem I reckon you will be a lot better off. We race with guys on ADSL2 with speeds way below yours and it is fine for the majority of the time.

[Dr. Pain]

I'm ADSL2+ and wifi and have no issues, unless another device is connected. I found laptops can hog the connection so much so the I go from 1.2 MB to 200K download speed. As Norbs said, those power adaptor things are a pain in the arse. Little things add up.

[Shaun]

50/20 should be fine. I run 30/1 mbit and have no ping issues to aussies servers

Sent from my LG-H815 using Tapatalk

[c.j]

Norbs was I having any pop up issues last night? I guess that is the main point of this, if I was not smooth on the server then I need to play with it. I will connect again tonight and see what it is when directly to the router.

Thanks for the info tho gents, a lot of shit has changed since I last played LFS.

[NeilPearson]

100ms lag is not bad, I raced heaps with Americans in iRacing with a 300+ Ping. iRacing does have the best netcode of any sim I have ever seen, but i was still able to race very clean doing NASCAR ovals. thats alot closer side by side stuff.

I wouldnt worry about it myself.

[wobblysauce]

AS with Neil.. There are more things involved with Ping then Line speed.

Though I would happily swap you mine for the 50/20 NBN..

[NeilPearson]

yeah Ill swap to, with my shitty 5/1

[Cursed]

Just to clear up some terminology:

Bandwidth: How much shit you can stick in the pipe at once, in your case you can pull 50Mb out and stuff 20Mb in every second (those are bits not bytes, so divide by 8 if you want bytes)
Latency: How long it takes to get the shit in, through and out the other end of the pipe.

As an example, wifi is an encrypted connection between your machine and a router. It takes time to do that encryption on your machine and decrypt it again on the router. That adds latency to the connection, even though bandwidth for wifi is quite high these days. I think ethernet over mains power is encrypted too, so it probably has the same issues. This is why wifi has traditionally been discouraged for on-line gamers.

Interactive on-line gaming likes low latency, as does voice and video comms. Streaming doesn't care much.

Just to complicate things - if your bandwidth is too low or is highly utilised, then latency will often increase as new shit has to wait in line to get into the pipe.

Hope that helps.

[hylas]

I like Cursed's response. Many great uses of the word shit. All correct shit

One thing OP said originally was that he has something like 10 devices connected at times. These devices can most definately use all your available bandwidth if they are downloading shit. You do have a lot of bandwidth tho, so they would have to be using up a lot of it. Maybe 3-4 devices streaming?

I can bring my 100 Mbps connection down to a halt, using just 1 pc downloading shit. I think Norbs is right tho, plug yourself into a switch or router directly and test

[c.j]

All information helps, I have no clue about this stuff. I am not trying to rub it in re the connection speed, I just don't want to ruin someone else's night because I am popping up everywhere. Testing last night was pretty stable at 130 ish. This morning on the same server I had 26.

I guess it has to do with sharing the pipe? I was just worried that I was shooting myself in the foot by not having my network set-up correctly. After turning off the WiFi on the laptop I now have the full throughput of the wired connection which seems pretty decent.

I was playing this morning with my daughter on netflix and it seemed ok. Unfortunately we will be racing at the peak usage time so hopefully it's a non issue.

I punted Rumble off the track once in LFS and he unloaded on me like a sailor full of rum and wind so I don't want to cause the same issue.

Cheers for the posts gents.

[wobblysauce]

Ethernet over Power is manly meant for renters(No cutting holes in walls/roofing to pass network cabling) or places with internal walls(mainly brick work) that hampers Wifi signals, as long as network is on the same power circuit in the house/building depending on how it is wired.

Side note, is either side plugged into a surge protected power board? as certain types of surge protectors will effect sync rates and throughput. With that said, what about other things on that power circuit? that could noise up the power signal, other power bricks, TVs, Microwaves, ect.

Next is which type of adapters are you using 85M, 200M, 500M? avg of about 1-5-10MB/s through put and most use 128 bit AES encryption.

[c.j]

Nah, not through a power board, specifically gave each side it's own gpo. As a sparky that is the one bit I understand, setting up a great network for gaming is all kind of alien to me. But slowly figuring it out. Cheers wobbles

[Dr. Pain]

Most people have a network is good enough for gaming. I still use the crappy Telstra modem router I got years ago when I first went to ADSL2+ I don't abuse my gear so it last until it either dies a natural death or, like my last modem, lightning wiped it out. I can race fine in AC, CARS, even iRacing was fine. Any lag I get is an external factor beyond my control. I don't play first person shooters though as I don't have the ping for it. I sit under 100 ping most of the time in AC, might get the odd spike and in mmo's I play, I get about 220 ping on a US server. I could upgrade my gear but I'd only get a slightly faster wifi speed. I stay wifi as I can't be arsed cabling and it does the job.

So don't stress too much over it CJ. It's like anything, you can chase that extra performance but is it worth it? A good test will be when we run Friday night fun again in AC.

[c.j]

Ok Dr, cheers. It was sitting in the mid 130s the other night with 3 - 5 ppl in the server. But it was consistent, never really moving at all so that is a good thing. Being such a high fidelity game I don't want to ruin it with a sub par connection. I realise I am pretty lucky to have the nbn here but yea it was mainly trying to get the right info to set up the local area properly.

[wobblysauce]

As with Dr.Pain, if you are getting solid numbers, you will get used of it and allow for the gap, a good test with LFS is bump drafting, weather you are good at bump drafting is another thing.
Mine was steady enough for EU/US players to make some records.