802.11b Pings

lynchie

Hi all,

Im thinking of getting a small wireless network at home. I know WEP encryption is weak etc... but I want to know if anybody has had any experience with wireless networks. Ive been told that the ping times are higher than wired networks. How much higher are they?? Would the latency be too high to play lan games on them etc??

Thanks,
Stephen

Bosco

As far as I know the latency of wireless connections is pretty low, and certainly low enough for games.

Ba$tard

You should check out recent posts on the CorkWAN mail.

Testing WAN Latency (albeit without WEP enabled) last nite...

at 11mb latency is about 4 ms Average....
at 5.5mb latency is about 15ms Average...

J.

Ronin

Using my wireless lan at home, a traceroute to barrysworld is 9 hopes and 45 msecs..

i've played from the office and its just as payable over wireless as a direct connection to the hub.

Ro.

bkehoe

Never seen more than 10ms, even at distances over 10KM during brief tests.

Nietzschean

Lads ye do know extra range issues would only be due to the h/w....if you attanded the same effency with your hardware as the guy using wireless 2 feet away as 100feet away(i assume the h/w would be different) the time for the signal to travel would be less than the signal to travel through the wiring of your pc...never mind being used by the pc or being decoded by your base station

timeout

Lads ye do know extra range issues would only be due to the h/w....if you attanded the same effency with your hardware as the guy using wireless 2 feet away as 100feet away(i assume the h/w would be different) the time for the signal to travel would be less than the signal to travel through the wiring of your pc...never mind being used by the pc or being decoded by your base station

So it would be slower if I used a USB wireless adaptor compared to an internal one?

Is that what your saying?

Nietzschean

So it would be slower if I used a USB wireless adaptor compared to an internal one?

i'm not quite an expert on the topic (yet). so take my opinion with a pinch of salt, but really yes i'd think usb external would be faster...usb ping times are low and your quality of connection should be higher...but there would be an inconvinence factor you should thing about compared with the pcmcia card. The usb system should have greater range and quality for obvious reasons....no matter what it does it won't interfer with the laptop and it can consumer more power for amplification and things like that... (it would probally be designed with a pc in mind)

timeout

So it would be slower if I used a USB wireless adaptor compared to an internal one?

yes i'd think usb external would be faster

no matter what it does it won't interfer with the laptop

The only reason I brought up USB connectors was I thought we were on about PCs. So yes I do agree that the pcmcia card would be better for the laptop and offer low enough ping times.

po0k

If you were using a scanner and/or other high bandwidth USB devie you'd be screwed.
USB is only 12MBits, Wan conenctions are 11Mbit normally.
PCI/PMCIA in PCI adapter is the best was to go.

[EDIT]
Although, the Lucent USB thing is actually just a PMCIA Gold card (even has the external connector) plugged into an adapter.....
Get out your drill and you *could* save yourself the cost of a PCI-adpater card(for a new PC)
[/EDIT]

bkehoe

I'd definatly go with PCMCIA before having to get a USB card.
Reasons: USB uses processor time, which isn't good if you're playing some sort of game over the wireless network. As said before, if you use anything other than the wireless card on the one port, then you'll have reduced performance. I'd also expect USB to possibly have a higher ping compared to a PCI-PCMCIA card.

USB wireless cards do not have increased power. The Orinoco solution is simply a normal pcmcia card in a usb adapter. Cisco wireless cards, available in PCI (complete with dipole antenna), and PCMCIA (with or without built in antenna) have the highest output power, 100mW.

The only real advantage a usb card would have is its ability to be positioned for a slightly better signal (e.g. orinoco usb stands upright on your desk, while it would be behind your pc if you use pcmcia).

Brendan.