Improve your Ping – Wired vs WiFi 6 vs WiFi 5 Compared – Does WiFi increase your ping?

In one in every of my latest posts, I coated the best way to maximise the WiFi speeds for the PS5, PC and Xbox Series X.

It is at all times finest to go together with a wired possibility the place attainable, but when you must use WiFi then a (*5*) is your finest wager.

For avid gamers, WiFi, or extra importantly, Internet connectivity is extra than simply uncooked throughput of knowledge. Ping speeds additionally play a big issue when enjoying on-line. The mixture of a poor web velocity and excessive pings could cause important lag throughout gaming.

The British Esports affiliation states a suitable ping is across the 40ms-60ms mark or decrease. A velocity of over 100ms reveals a noticeable delay and over 170 some video games will reject your connection totally.

If you will have, say a 10ms ping (0.01 seconds), your gameplay will appear quicker and smoother than enjoying with 100ms, for instance.

But how a lot does WiFi negatively have an effect on your ping? And if it does, is it sufficient to have a adverse influence on your gaming?

For testing, I initially used the Netgear WAX610 WiFi 6 access point, I then redid all of the exams utilizing the Netgear RAX120 the next day. Partly to double-check there have been no random numbers, but in addition to see if there was any profit from the elevated bandwidth that the 160Mhz channel width provided over the usual 80Mhz

VelocityTest.Net ping and obtain speeds

A fast take a look at on my PC utilizing Virgin Media M500. Using VelocityTest with 3 exams averaged out.

  1. Wired – 7 ms connecting at 546Mbps
  2. Wi-Fi 6 160Hz 2400Mbps – 8ms connecting at 545Mbps
  3. Wi-Fi 6 80Hz 1200Mbps – 8ms connecting at 545Mbps
  4. Wi-fi 5 160Hz 1732Mbps- 11ms connecting at 543Mbps
  5. Wi-fi 5 80Hz 866Mbps- 11ms connecting at 514Mbps
  6. Wi-Fi 6 2.4Ghz 574Mbps – 9ms connecting at 263.7.3Mbps
  7. Wi-Fi 5 2.4Ghz 300Mbps – 10ms connecting at 192Mbps

So with this take a look at, there was not a lot distinction in ping throughout the board. Throughput solely began to drop once I used WiFi 5 on the usual 80hz channel. However, if I had gigabit connectivity, we’d have seen Wi-Fi 6 @ 80Hz begin to battle.

Netmeter Ping Test

Netmeter affords a superior Ping take a look at, testing the identical server 100 occasions to supply a extra correct image.

All these exams have been executed in comparatively shut vary to the router, so my recommendation can be to used a wired connection on this state of affairs it doesn’t matter what.

Moving round the home away from the router lowers the throughput significantly, however the ping just isn’t too badly affected with 5Ghz 160mhz Wifi 6 growing by lower than 2ms wherever I’m in the home.

Avg Median Min Max Jitter
Wired 10.1 10 8 15 1.1
5Ghz WiFi 6 11.8 11 9 20 1.5
5Ghz 160mhz Wifi 6 11.9 12 8 28 3
5Ghz WiFi 5 13 12 10 31 2.3
5Ghz 160mhz Wifi 5 13.7 13 11 25 2.3
2.4Ghz WiFi 6 13.9 12 9 50 4.5
2.4Ghz WiFi 5 16.9 14 9 83 7.8

4G Ping speeds – Using 4G/5G router for your house Internet just isn’t good for gaming

In previous blog posts, I’ve mentioned that 4G and 5G house Internet has turn into a viable various for many individuals.  A velocity take a look at on Vodafone offers me the next velocity than I’d be capable of get from BT Openreach fibre (102Mbps/19mbps).

However, for gaming, utilizing cellular information just isn’t nice, even with 5G you’ll introduce important latency.

With Vodafone, I get a median ping of 49ms, a max of 83ms, and a minimal of 37ms. While that isn’t terrible, whenever you mix it with the ping launched from the server location, it might push your recreation into the unplayable territory.

Ping speeds from totally different server places

Server or participant places are the largest think about your ping velocity, however does WiFi introduce any additional delays?

Wired

no server common median min. max.
1 Ping Test: US – Washington 95 ms 95 ms 91 ms 100 ms
2 Ping Test: US – San Francisco 154 ms 154 ms 149 ms 160 ms
3 Ping Test: NL – Amsterdam 24 ms 24 ms 22 ms 29 ms
4 Ping Test: RU – Moscow 66 ms 65 ms 60 ms 81 ms

WiFi 6

no server common median min. max.
1 Ping Test: US – Washington 99 ms 99 ms 96 ms 110 ms
2 Ping Test: US – San Francisco 155 ms 154 ms 151 ms 160 ms
3 Ping Test: NL – Amsterdam 26 ms 26 ms 23 ms 35 ms
4 Ping Test: RU – Moscow 66 ms 65 ms 63 ms 82 ms

WiFi 5

no server common median min. max.
1 Ping Test: US – Washington 100 ms 100 ms 95 ms 108 ms
2 Ping Test: US – San Francisco 157 ms 157 ms 155 ms 160 ms
3 Ping Test: NL – Amsterdam 31 ms 30 ms 28 ms 39 ms
4 Ping Test: RU – Moscow 70 ms 69 ms 67 ms 76 ms

So as you the gaming server turns into additional away, the small variations in the way you connect with your LAN begin to look much more insignificant. While there’s a 29% increase in Ping with the Amsterdam servers on wired vs WiFi 5, this drops right down to 5.2% for the Washington server.

Overall

My outcomes usually are not precisely an excessive amount of of a shock. The time it takes to ping you router, no matter connection medium, is a negligible issue within the general ping speeds you’ll expertise whereas gaming.

One issue I’ve not examined is QoS and the way numerous customers on the identical LAN could have an effect on your ping. I’m in a family of two, so it’s a little troublesome to precisely take a look at this.

Use a gaming router to enhance your ping

My exams reveal there’s a sturdy case for not spending your cash on costly gaming oriented networking gear. Unless you will have an ultra-fast Internet connection, you in all probability don’t want a WiFi 6 router to get the perfect speeds on the PS5 or PC, and the Xbox is already restricted to WiFi 5.

If you will have a particularily congested community, similar to a big family all of whom use bandwidth-heavy functions, then a fancier router could assist. It ought to give you superior high quality of service options vs your bog-standard ISP router.

With your native community not being the foremost explanation for a gradual ping, the perfect resolution to laggy on-line gaming is to seek out gamers or servers that provide a low ping.

Technically, that is might be fairly simple, if the sport affords an choice to manually choose a server you’ll be able to decide one near you, or in some circumstances, video games can even show the ping of that server.

There are some routers that assist with this. The (*6*) which runs DumaOS has superior performance that permits you to keep away from lag-heavy matchups.

With the Geo-Fencing device, you’ll be able to choose server areas permitting you to retrict which servers you connect with by each location and ping.

There is then a Ping Heatmap which pings each server for your recreation of alternative and visualises your latency to every one – briefly, you’ll see which servers provide the smoothest gameplay. The heatmap is regularly up to date with the latest video games, so you’ll be able to nonetheless have the benefit on model new releases.

An various possibility, which I’ve not tried personally, is the ASUS GT-AX11000 ROG Rapture which incorporates built-in help for the Gamers Private Network, powered by WTFast, which claims to supply personal, optimized web connections to recreation servers, minimizing ping and latency to make sure clean, lag-free gaming.

Last replace on 2021-04-20 / Affiliate hyperlinks / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

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