How Mbps do you need for online gaming?

[$eamonk3y]

Evening all!

I'm thinking of buying a homeplug type of thing because I need internet in my 'shed' at the end of the garden.

1) Does internet speed get reduced with homeplugs? Travelling through power lines and what not - surely not designed to be ferrying my gaming signals?

2) How many Mbps does my homeplug need to run at? One at PC World is 200Mbps? Is this enough to play online games? I don't know how many Mbps normal wired internet is so I can't compare...!

Cheers,

$eamonk3y

[Hicks12]

Basic cat 5 cable is 100mb iirc, so thats essentially double but im guessing deterioration on the line would make it around the same as cat 5. Check on the web before you buy anything cause pc world might be expensive(even check their website its normally cheaper!).

[Jasp]

200mbps is far more then you will get from any current UK broadband provider unless you pay business rates, personally nothing beats a good olde cat5e or cat 6 cable for internet gaming. Not heard to bad things about the home plugs mind you and if it gets even half its rated speed it will be fine for gaming.

[LegacyOne]

1) Does internet speed get reduced with homeplugs? Travelling through power lines and what not - surely not designed to be ferrying my gaming signals?

Yes max I think is 10Mbps with that setup and latency might be bad.

2) How many Mbps does my homeplug need to run at? One at PC World is 200Mbps? Is this enough to play online games? I don't know how many Mbps normal wired internet is so I can't compare...!

Really gaming online not as a host only needs 128/256Kbps but latency is more important.

[Jay]

for MMOs they should run on 56k dial up but some require 256K +

Your lan will not be the limiting factor

[$eamonk3y]

Ok thanks - so they should do the job then. I'll get them from somewhere where I can take them back if they don't work - the wiring the 'shed' is seperate to the house (I don't really know much about it!) so I just have to test and see...

Cheers,

$eamonk3y

[peterb]

Just be aware that whikle the instantaneous throughput may be as quoted, you may find that sustained is less. Don't confuse latency with speed. Although there is a relationship, it isn't a linear correlation. Homeplugs will be better than wireless, but not as good as a cabled lan connection, in terms of latency.

(As an analogy - not a perfect one - but it illustrates the point - think of two printers - one has a print speed of 10 pages/minute - with a time to first print of 30 seconds. The second has a print speed of 2 pages/min with a time to first print of ten seconds. The first one is better - isn't it? Well, yes if you are printing say ten pages - they will take 90 seconds to print - the secons will take just under 5 minutes - but if you are printing one page, the second is better - one page appears in 10 seconds, the first one takes 30. the second pexample exhibits lower speed and lower latency, the first illustrates high spedd, but happens to have higher latency. As I said earlier, not a perfect analogy, but illustrates the point.

Back to the subject, if you can't do cable, then homeplug will probably be the next best alternative, but speed isn't the whole picture, and latency may (only may) be worse on a homeplug connection.

[$eamonk3y]

Ok thanks - a great, if not slightly hard to get my head around at 11.55 in the evening! analogy and very helpful advise.

I think that homeplugs are my only choice (if they work with the weird wiring from source to sink) as there is no way an ethernet cable can get to the back of the garden (obviously) and I've always found wireless to be too unreliable (eg. just today in CSS, my ping was jumping around from 15 to 400 every five minutes!).

Cheers,

$eamonk3y

[Jasp]

It will do seamonkey, Vista has a wonderful inbuilt tool called Wlanautoconfig, basically what it does is scan for a wireless network once every minute on the dot, problem is it has to cut off you current connection to do so resulting in a ping jump and back down again. Problem is quite easy to show, open a command prompt type ping 192.168.1.1 /t or whatever your routers IP address is and watch the ms times. Now XP also has the same inbuilt tool, the beauty with XP is you can turn the bloody thing off...

[peterb]

Ok thanks - a great, if not slightly hard to get my head around at 11.55 in the evening! analogy and very helpful advise.

I think that homeplugs are my only choice (if they work with the weird wiring from source to sink) as there is no way an ethernet cable can get to the back of the garden (obviously) and I've always found wireless to be too unreliable (eg. just today in CSS, my ping was jumping around from 15 to 400 every five minutes!).

Cheers,

$eamonk3y

How long is your garden? You could run ethernet - either in conduit if you have a wall to run it along. or you could use external grade cable (it is more expensive than cat5) and run it along a fence. You obviously have mains power there - how does that get to the location?

[jim]

I'm not too sure why you say an ethernet cable couldn't get to the back of the garden, they do make shielded cable for use outdoors, and I guarantee you'll get better performance than using homeplugs.

Having said that, if the homeplugs work (it's all dependent on the quality of your wiring, make sure you don't use them on extension leads or surge protectors as they won't help), then they should be fine. Speed is more than likely irrelevant - suppose you have a fast internet connection at 6 Mbps - it's easy to see that 200 Mbps home network isn't important.

Latency on the other hand (basically ping in online gaming) is a completely different kettle of fish - you can have a 256 Kbps net connection with better latency than a 24 Mbps one, it's all dependent on line quality, distance from exchange, distance from server, so on so forth. Although if you use wireless/homeplug, they might lose packets due to imperfect connections, and thus worsen the ping.

I would recommend giving homeplug a crack, but don't worry about getting expensive fast units, it probably won't make a difference - if pings are very poor compared to an ethernet connection, then perhaps it would be worth looking into outdoor Cat 5e or Cat 6 cabling.

[$eamonk3y]

It's about 35m. The people who put in the mains dug a hole along the garden (bloody ruined it as well!) so I wouldn't want to go down that route again! Running it along the fence could be an idea though...

Do you know where I could get that sort of cable?

Cheers,

$eamonk3y

[GSte]

I use homeplugs, and even though our wiring is pretty poor tbh it doesn't affect my gaming in the slightest. As others have said, Mbps isn't too important, latency is what matters, but that's down to your actual connection from your ISP mainly rather than anything else.

[peterb]

I have bought external cable from this site in the past (about 3 years ago)

http://www.minitran.co.uk/pages/prod...0Solid%20Cable

This site looks OK (but I have necver used them)
http://www.cablemonkey.co.uk/acatalo...ernal_146.html

And this one would probably do the job... (but again I haven't used them)

https://store.polkaspots.com/50m-wat...ethernet-cable

(This site talks about cables attracting lightning. It isn't that they attract lightning, but along length is more susceptible to generating surghes from lightning strikes (which as a high voltage/current discharge generates electromagnetic energy). (This was recently discussed in another thread on the networking forum) However the mains cable taking power to the location is also just as susceptible, so IMHO, it isn't significantly adding to the risk - but in an electrical storm, safest option is to unplug all cable and wait until it passes.)

[$eamonk3y]

Ok thanks for the help guys - I'll look into it.
It's a shame they only seem to sell rolls of like 300m when I only need about 50!

Cheers,

$eamonk3y

[Grymdawg]

Does this stem from:

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-hardwa...uld-i-get.html

As i said, ethernet or homeplugs are the way to go

If you're running a cable to the shed you should be fine, ethernet can go 100m before it suffers i think.