Internet Wireless vs Wired

[Abigs]

Wireless = lots of possibilities of interruption / spikes / lag etc. depending on positioning, signal strength, interference from other devices etc.

Wired = the only possibility is your wire's physically broken/damaged.. either your net is broken or its stable.. no weird lag spikes out of nowhere

[SummonerSenah]

Wired for me. It's more stable and I rarely have lag. My roommate plays wireless and has occasional lag and d/c errors.

[TheTen]

Wireless on PS, Wired on PC. No differences.

Pretty sure it depends heavily on your wireless setup. What router do you use, what provider, how many walls does it have to go through etc. My Playstation is sitting right next to my high speed router, so the connection is pretty damn good for wireless. If it were in a different room, it might sing a different tune.

[NeruMew]

Wireless on PS, Wired on PC. No differences.

Pretty sure it depends heavily on your wireless setup. What router do you use, what provider, how many walls does it have to go through etc. My Playstation is sitting right next to my high speed router, so the connection is pretty damn good for wireless. If it were in a different room, it might sing a different tune.

That's what she said. . .



And she was right!

Cheap routers and wireless network boards for your PC have a lot of issues, package loss and disconnects. Walls between the WAP and your device also lower a lot the signal, increasing the chances for this to happen.

[Marishi-Ten]

What do you use? If you have used both, what differences have you noticed between them?

It depends on the EMI from your wifi card to the router. Wifi is more susceptible to drop out/spikes than wired. Remember that wifi is still more or less LoS (line of sight). The more barriers you have in the way, the more degraded the signal becomes. I'm on wifi about 95% of the time. When I parse my latency and jitter values if I'm in, let's say, my bedroom, I will get spikes every now and then (I have a bathroom between my router and my bedroom. Copper, piping, drywall are all excellent at absorbing frequencies) but when I have my laptop 12 feet from my router with direct LoS, nary a spike. If other devices on the network are using wifi as well, it can bring down the entire spectrum (802.11n is backward compatible with g, but g isn't compatible with n. If a g device is on the network, the network drops to g for everyone lowering transmit speeds, but stabilizing connections).

Mileage varies. The goal would be to overlap your transmission radius of your wifi card and router. You could try a higher gain antenna (that let's you modify squelch and DBuV. For good signal you want your DBuV send and receive values to be 90-110. Any lower or higher and you will run into problems) to increase wifi performance or play with your wifi settings on the router (QoS, Prioritization, 802.11n only, DHCP Reservation, Static IP) and on your computer itself (Control Panel > Network and Sharing Center > Change Adapter Settings > Right click WLAN > Properties > Configure > Advanced/Power Management. Careful with the advanced settings. When in doubt, Google it first as some of the stuff is confusing. IBSS for example deals only with ad hoc networks and doesn't apply to like 99.999998% of networks).

Wired gives me a stable connection pretty much all the time, but I like having the ability to be portable and not tied down to one room all the time. If I had to choose, I prefer the wifi route. I'll take slight performance issues every now and again over being tied to a desk 100% of the time.

I'm really banking on quantum routing becoming a standard. It's sad that we are still using wireless technology that was developed in 1893 and with so much garbage OTA, we need something new (spectrum is finite).

[Berit]

I bought a gaming router years ago, never had a problem with wireless until just recently. I noticed more of my neighbors getting wifi and the fact that my router is becoming outdated (signal interference and degradation), I decided to switch to wired however I didn't want to move my PC since I have it set up nicely in a room on the opposite side of my house. So I caved in an bought a powerline adapter kit, and I couldn't be happier. Now I run my router to one adapter through an outlet, and my computer/game consoles to a switch which is connected to the other adapter through an outlet in my gaming room.

In short, wireless is good if your signal is good and nothing interferes with it. Otherwise wired is best.

[Marishi-Ten]

I bought a gaming router years ago, never had a problem with wireless until just recently. I noticed more of my neighbors getting wifi and the fact that my router is becoming outdated (signal interference and degradation), I decided to switch to wired however I didn't want to move my PC since I have it set up nicely in a room on the opposite side of my house. So I caved in an bought a powerline adapter kit, and I couldn't be happier. Now I run my router to one adapter through an outlet, and my computer/game consoles to a switch which is connected to the other adapter through an outlet in my gaming room.

In short, wireless is good if your signal is good and nothing interferes with it. Otherwise wired is best.

PLC Bridges are the bane of my existence. I've never had good luck with any of them (Noisy busbar at my main distribution panel and I'm way too lazy to wrap ferrite). PLC is dependent on the electrical load of the home, so it's kind of a trade off. Power lines give off EMI and since those bridges are Point A to B access points, if you have a noisy circuit/power strip/surge protector/motor capacitor/reactive capacitor/compressor it can degrade the PLC signal causing drop outs. I believe that the IEEE has the 80Hz narrowband set aside for PoE (powerline over ethernet) devices.

I'm actually jealous that you got PLC bridges to work haha.

[Tupsi]

What do you use? If you have used both, what differences have you noticed between them?

Wireless with older PC and older hardware - Had some issues dodging.
Wired and wireless on newer PC with newer network card - Issues went away until recent routing problems that affects AT&T.

[Caraway]

It really depends. Where I am, the best connection I can get is 5Mbps which is a sad sight from the ~50Mbps that my wireless router supports. Even accounting for latency, walls, packet overhead (you'll never even get 45 on G wireless) that means my bottleneck is going to be my service provider by an order of magnitude.

And this is the case for a lot of people. Unless you're pushing up to 30-40Mbps connection then you're not going to get much difference from either. If you are lucky enough to have the really fast connections though you'll want to use a wired connection (or Wireless N if you have it).

[Tiggy]

Swapped to wired and noticed a significant decrease in lag spikes.