How is wifi tech developing in terms of latency? Are we getting any closer to ethernet levels of ping? How good can it get?

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

Games are much better online when you play with a wired connection (with some fighting games just being miserable over wireless) due to reduced latency over ethernet. However, it can be pretty inconvenient to have a wired connection depending on where the ethernet outlets for your room are and your room setup in general. However, despite how important lower wifi latency could be for gaming, I don't hear much about that technology. Is there just not much progress happening due to physics? What is the situation like? With better internet in the future, will fighting games be much more doable over wifi in the future?

 

[Theswweet]

WiFi 6 is definitely a step up, but it's going to be a while before enough folks upgrade their setups to take advantage of it.

 

[Komo]

Nope not any different not for consumers. At least not any time soon.

 

[Deleted member 21709]

I hope the next gen of consoles will have faster chips.

 

[eraFROMAN]

Look up "spectrum." Wifi is light energy, and with more devices using WiFi, improving tech can't make more "space" in the air for light to travel uninhibited. Ethernet will always be better; if not faster, at least much more stable.

 

[Deleted member 2474]

technologically speaking it's entirely possible to get near-wired levels of latency and performance over 802.11ac today, it's just that the wifi setups in most consoles and many of the cheap wifi dongles people use on their PCs suck ass. the original ps4 didn't even support 5ghz 802.11n, for fuck's sake.

with a high-end router and a good MIMO antenna setup on the device wifi can be very fast and stable.

 

[Minsc]

Look up "spectrum." Wifi is light energy, and with more devices using WiFi, improving tech can't make more "space" in the air for light to travel uninhibited. Ethernet will always be better; if not faster, at least much more stable.

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Strangely enough in the recent DS4 thread, I learned that wired USB has more latency (3-4ms) than wireless Bluetooth (1ms).

 

[GMM]

Most people have shitty wifi because they don't want to pay for good home infrastructure and they will still complain when their shit is not working.

 

[Transistor]

Most people have shitty wifi because they don't want to pay for good home infrastructure and they will still complain when their shit is not working.

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This right here is a very good point. Many people just use their ISPs modem / router combo and those are usually garbage

 

[EvilBoris]

technologically speaking it's entirely possible to get near-wired levels of latency and performance over 802.11ac today, it's just that the wifi setups in most consoles and many of the cheap wifi dongles people use on their PCs suck ass. the original ps4 didn't even support 5ghz 802.11n, for fuck's sake.

with a high-end router and a good MIMO antenna setup on the device wifi can be very fast and stable.

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isn't a lot of it down the vast majority of people using the crummy wifi router their ISP has given them?
The xboxes all support wireless AC, but i imagine that most people don't have a router that supports that.

Especially if you've been with the same ISP for a few years, they try to avoid sending out new hardware.

 

[GemmolSwitchPS4]

Wifi 6 will blow everyone pants off once it become main stream I plan to upgrade to WiFi 6 gaming router next year

I hope Microsoft or Sony use WiFi 6 in their next system

 

[Deleted member 2474]

Most people have shitty wifi because they don't want to pay for good home infrastructure and they will still complain when their shit is not working.

Click to shrink...

This right here is a very good point. Many people just use their ISPs modem / router combo and those are usually garbage

Click to shrink...

isn't a lot of it down the vast majority of people using the crummy wifi router their ISP has given them?
The xboxes all support wireless AC, but i imagine that most people don't have a router that supports that.

Especially if you've been with the same ISP for a few years, they try to avoid sending out new hardware.

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yep, this is a big part of it too. the standard router comcast gives out is absolute garbage, for instance. performance degradation is so bad even a few feet away. if you live in an apartment complex, 5ghz helps a lot as well as the spectrum is much less cluttered, but most of the ISP-issued routers don't support 5ghz.

 

[Lkr]

isn't a lot of it down the vast majority of people using the crummy wifi router their ISP has given them?
The xboxes all support wireless AC, but i imagine that most people don't have a router that supports that.

Especially if you've been with the same ISP for a few years, they try to avoid sending out new hardware.

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That's part of it, but the network adapters in the consoles are bad bad bad. Part of it is due to the limited CPU power, but you can't download gigabit even on Ethernet for example, before we even discuss the WiFi adapters. The tech is there, will it be put in the consoles though?
Way back in the day I had playable pings with a wusb54g too.

 

[Juice]

I mean you can't control other people's home setups. If they have crummy WiFi they're not going to go out of their way to run Ethernet either. If you play with them, it'll be slower. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

if you just focus on making sure your own setup is fast, well configured, etc, I'm interested in seeing latency benchmarks over the past few technologicalevolutions of WiFi

 

[Dr. Mario]

5GHz is already at previous ethernet level pings, but ethernet is also developing in the mean time.

 

[Briareos]

I don't imagine there's much incentive to push for low latency wifi. I would think (just spent five minutes trying to find statistics but couldn't) the vast majority of traffic in typical consumer homes is web pages and streaming audio/video, none of which are latency critical and instead benefit significantly from improved signal robustness and/or rely heavily on large buffering windows to avoid interruptions.

 

[DSP]

It's not about speed, it's more about reliability when it comes to playing online games, dropped packets will ruin your experience. The wifi adapter you get in consoles is like bottom of the barrel garbage so it is not going to matter how much you invested in your router, the connection is not going to be very reliable. I think xbox one has 2x2, so that's pretty decent but ps4 is 1x1, I think launch ps4 is not even dual band, if you want 5ghz you have to buy pro, not sure on that. 3x3 wifi link is reliable enough to play games on, it's just expensive, both on client and router. Like only macbook pros ship with 3x3 wifi, nobody else does it as far as I know and a 4x4 router with a good processor is going to cost about $200+.

I don't know if you can use USB networking adapter on consoles, if it works then you should get 3x3 wifi adapter yourself, they will never ship with something decent.

 

[tokkun]

The problem WIFI has traditionally had with latency has to do with the way it handles collision avoidance. If two devices try to transmit at the same time on the same channel their signals collide, the packets are dropped, and you have to back off and send again later. It is much more difficult to do collision sensing for wireless channels than for Ethernet, so Wifi uses an avoidance protocol where you first have to ask permission to send data and get a response back. This adds a lot of overhead compared to Ethernet, particularly the more crowded the spectrum is where you are operating your network.

There are technical advancements coming to help with this stuff. Within 802.11ax (a.k.a. Wifi-6) they are using a new version of frequency division multiplexing as well as some other techniques to reduce contention. For very latency sensitive applications, there is 802.11ay (a.k.a. WiGig v2). It operates at the 60 GHz frequency. With such short wavelengths, it is difficult for signals to penetrate walls, which means that you don't need to worry about contention from nearby wireless networks if you live in an apartment.

 

[EvilBoris]

That's part of it, but the network adapters in the consoles are bad bad bad. Part of it is due to the limited CPU power, but you can't download gigabit even on Ethernet for example, before we even discuss the WiFi adapters. The tech is there, will it be put in the consoles though?

Click to shrink...

Both the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X have a wireless chip with a data throughput of 867Mbit/s
As someone has pointed out to me when i was complaining about download speeds, the console's CPUs and OS's restrict download speeds, that is probably the bottleneck rather than the network chips.

But again, bandwidth isn't the issue.

 

[Punished Dan]

The problem WIFI has traditionally had with latency has to do with the way it handles collision avoidance. If two devices try to transmit at the same time on the same channel their signals collide, the packets are dropped, and you have to back off and send again later. It is much more difficult to do collision sensing for wireless channels than for Ethernet, so Wifi uses an avoidance protocol where you first have to ask permission to send data and get a response back. This adds a lot of overhead compared to Ethernet, particularly the more crowded the spectrum is where you are operating your network.

There are technical advancements coming to help with this stuff. Within 802.11ax (a.k.a. Wifi-6) they are using a new version of frequency division multiplexing as well as some other techniques to reduce contention. For very latency sensitive applications, there is 802.11ay (a.k.a. WiGig v2). It operates at the 60 GHz frequency. With such short wavelengths, it is difficult for signals to penetrate walls, which means that you don't need to worry about contention from nearby wireless networks if you live in an apartment.

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Half duplex and full duplex.

 

[eraFROMAN]

Strangely enough in the recent DS4 thread, I learned that wired USB has more latency (3-4ms) than wireless Bluetooth (1ms).

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Yeah, I believe it's the same for the Switch Pro Controller; it's faster with wireless than wired, which is great in a home setting, but using that in a tournament setting is a mess. WiFi is the same deal; if you have a good set up, it can be just fine, but that becomes more difficult since the improved WiFi tech actually has a much shorter range. That trade off is basically non-existent with Ethernet, outside of having to wire it through the house or room.

When it comes to games, though, everyone is generally at the mercy of the worst connection as long as everything is p2p, so even if WiFi improves, it's convincing everyone to upgrade that'll be a challenge.

 

[ViciousAnchovy]

Look up "spectrum." Wifi is light energy, and with more devices using WiFi, improving tech can't make more "space" in the air for light to travel uninhibited. Ethernet will always be better; if not faster, at least much more stable.

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If you're replying to the blows quote like I think you are, I'm pretty sure they're referring to how 5 GHz bands have more channels to operate on than 2.4 GHz bands do, and the relative prominence of 2.4 GHz bands does mean their channels are generally more crowded.

https://kb.netgear.com/29396/What-is-the-difference-between-2-4-GHz-and-5-GHz-wireless-frequencies

yep, this is a big part of it too. the standard router comcast gives out is absolute garbage, for instance. performance degradation is so bad even a few feet away. if you live in an apartment complex, 5ghz helps a lot as well as the spectrum is much less cluttered, but most of the ISP-issued routers don't support 5ghz.

Click to shrink...