LISTEN HERE SCRUBS, Wireless or Wired Internet for XBL/PSN it makes no difference!

Tech Talk
21

This is pretty much correct. I’ve done quite a bit of wireless engineering for both indoor/outdoor wifi, and long distance wireless backhauls.

Even in a completely noise-free environment, wifi is a serial, half-duplex technology. It cycles through each attached device in turn, gives them a chance to talk, then goes back through and talks to them. I believe the baseline ping in a perfect environment is 15ms or 20ms for the cheaper access points, and that is JUST from your device to the AP. I’ve seen better ones where the baseline is 3ms - but keep in mind that I haven’t done the research in a good long while.

So to say it doesn’t matter isn’t 100% accurate. What matters more is the noise environment that your wifi setup is installed in, and more critically - how is your connection from your demarc (usually a dsl/cable modem) to your provider’s backbone drain? I keep a performance monitor on mine, and it fluctuates pretty wildly at times - but in most situations I have 30ms or less to the backbone drain, and I’ve got all of my consoles hard-wired to my firewall. Only my laptops and my iPhone are wifi. Basically anything that has to be “Just In Time” on traffic should be hardwired whenever possible.

ALSO - if you’re serious about online play, ditch your commercial router and upgrade to something a bit more hardcore, like pfSense:

http://www.pfsense.org

At one point in time, I had 6 pieces of hardware sitting around that I’d intended to sell, but literally any PC made in the last 5 years would do the trick. This is what I use, and I have it shaping all traffic in and out of my home. If it’s JiT, it gets top priority. So XBL, SIP, and Video Conferencing all get top priority, followed by SSH, with HTTP/HTTPS/FTP on another tier, and finally all P2P filesharing coming dead last. That doesn’t mean my P2P sucks, it just means that if I’m online playing a game, P2P takes a back seat to my game, and when my game is done, so long as no one is on a VOIP call or browsing the web, my P2P stuff can go nuts. Best of all, when properly configured, pfSense’s NAT implementation shows up as “Open” to XBL as opposed to “Moderate”, which even Linux’s NAT implementation shows up as. Some seriously rock-solid connectivity.

So if you want a top notch online game, the following things you want are:

  1. A LOCAL DSL provider. One where if you had to, you could get the owner on the phone. Make sure you get a business-class connection with no filtering, and no firewalling upstream. DO NOT GET CABLE. I could give a whole dissertation on this, but if you’re on cable, everything else I tell you is moot depending on what your neighbors are doing. DO NOT write me off as being biased on this point. If you want a T-1 or fiber, those are decent options too, but if you’re serious about online gaming, cable will be the end of you.

  2. A decent firewall with a top-notch NAT implementation, or a static IP address for your console (translation: fork over more cash to the ISP). pfSense is my personal favorite, and I’ve yet to see a better performer for the price.

  3. Hard wire your consoles. Doesn’t matter if it’s 10-Base-T, 100, or 1000, but it needs to be full duplex, and hooked to a decent store and forward switch. If it’s doing cut-through at the switch, pitch it and spend the $20 it takes to get a store and forward switch. Wifi, to be blunt, just introduces too many variables.

  4. Test your cables. Borrow a cable tester if you have to, since they cost about $60, but test each cable end-to-end. Just because you get connected doesn’t mean a cable isn’t damaged - it just means that error correction is taking over and doing it’s job. You waste precious ms on error correction.

  5. Realize that even with the above, several factors remain outside your control. Even with the awesome NAT implementation that pfSense has, I find myself having to reboot my 360 sometimes in order to get a decent ping to specific opponents on XBL. The reasons for this can be one of many - poor matchmaking algorhythms at MS, poorly chosen routes (which can possibly be flushed by turning off your 360, flushing the states table in pfSense and then turning your 360 back on), and heck - even magical fairie pixie dust might have something to do with it. Also, if any provider between you, MS, and then MS and your opponent, and eventually between you and your opponent if the game is configured to run matches P2P is having problems, YOU are going to have problems. The only thing you can do is watch online network advisories, OR do what I told you in step one and get a local DSL provider that actually might care about such issues and fix them. :wink:

That’s about it. You can use wifi, but it has nothing to do with being a scrub if you believe wifi might impact match quality. It can and does. I am a certified network engineer, and I approve of this message. :rofl:

22

Well thanks for the input fellas, i have just spoken to my noob friend and he admits he’s a scrub. I will crush him on xbl with my wired assist.

Hope this thread is useful for people previously ignorant to the pro’s and cons of wireless networking.

I expected toodles to come in and answer my question, but alas he can’t hook me up every time. Thanks for the responses, i quoted many of them to the scrub!

Also, wireless sticks lag too!

23

I’m really screwed because I live at school, and our connection here sucks. I use a wireless bridge to get online, and ontop of the fact that the bridge took about 2-3 hours to get working, Our NAT settings are all messed up because of security. I can log onto PSN just fine-- when I’m on the PS3’s OS, at least. As soon as I start a game though, it kicks me off of PSN, and I have to try logging back in like 100 times before I can actually play a game online. My room mate who doesn’t usually have any trouble with Xbox Live just recently started having a similar problem with Gears of War 2, which apparently is also picky about our school’s NAT settings. >,<

I can’t wait to be home again for Christmas, back with my parents’ nice, headache-free connection. I am probably going to have a massive binge on Street Fighter 2 HD, MGS4, and Soul Calibur 4.

24

My brain is melted :looney:

Very informative post! I sure as heck learned some stuff.

I’ll have to keep all that in mind for future reference. Well, maybe I should just copy it down lol.

25

I heard from a friend that the signal strength will never be higher than what the internet people will allow because any more power will fry your brain, it’s kind of the same principle for cell phone strength giving you brain cancer if they’re too powerful

26

Holy shit^ Now that is dedication!

27

Find someone willing to set up pfSense as their firewall, then have them give you an OpenVPN account. Set up an OpenVPN tunnel to their firewall, and set up to route all traffic across it. Suddenly all NAT problems will be gone. You’ll be trading off NAT for ping time, but it would have to be better than the log on, log off mess you have going on right now.

In fact if there were enough people here interested, I wouldn’t mind hosting an OpenVPN server for people to tunnel across to get to XBL and PSN. I’d host it downtown right on the backbone. Never actually considered how useful that might be to college students. :slight_smile:

28

…

The “internet people”. So that’s who I keep seeing scurrying around my server racks before I turn the lights on in the data center! :rofl:

29

So you know what I’m talking about with the traffic graphs, heres the 4 hour running graph:

http://www.numbski.com/img/traffic/4hour.png

16 Hour:

http://www.numbski.com/img/traffic/16hour.png

2 Days:

http://www.numbski.com/img/traffic/2days.png

1 Month:

http://www.numbski.com/img/traffic/1month.png

Gives you a clear picture of the ups and downs of how the connection is doing. You can see that my connection dropped out for a bit for about 20 mins at about 8:30a this morning, and you can also tell when my ISP is having serious issues, where it shoots way up over 200ms in ping time at 11a, and stayed that way until noon.

My traffic shaping is tracked in a similar manner:

http://www.numbski.com/img/traffic/shaper.png

Actually, now that I’m looking at it, it looks like my wife was using something that was hammering my connection for about an hour at 11a that the shaper mistook as the 360. Oops. :stuck_out_tongue: I know it wasn’t me. I was at the gym lifting weights.

30

I figured someone would have explained this already, but here’s how wireless works. Your router (transceiver) basically broadcasts a “blob” of data into the air repeatedly intermittently at a certain time interval. Your wireless devices then pick up this signal and broadcast their own data packets for the router to pick up, and it also does this intermittently.

Because of this, unlike with a wired connection, you can experience ping delay due to your wi-fi sending packets in “bursts,” as opposed to a constant stream, and this is where things like SRX and MIMO come into play, where they will use multiple data bands to minimize the gap between data transmissions.

So, basically, there will be a difference, but for me it’s not a big enough difference for me to want to run a wire from my PS3 to my router.

EDIT: And I’m pretty sure neither console can do SRX or MIMO.

31

Yeah, I mentioned this on the first page. It’s serial and half-duplex whereas if you have the proper switching, wired is full duplex and store and forward at layer 2.

32

There are regulations on wireless signals, by the FCC. However, the reasoning your friend has given you is all wrong. They don’t want you interfering with other wireless communications such as radio, cell phones, ect. Wireless will continue to improve, they are always coming up with better ways to transmit the data.

Anyways, fibre optics is superior to copper (Ethernet) while Ethernet is superior to wireless. Wireless will have a bit more latency and is much more vulnerable to interference. However, you can still have a great wireless connection that you can play games on. Its entirely possible for there to be no noticeable difference between your wireless and wired set-ups.

The simplest thing that proves your IT friend wrong is that wired communication travels at the speed of light while wireless travels at the speed of sound.