Wi-fi, neighbors, gaming, oh my!

September 24, 2005 7:30 PM

Wi-fi, neighbors, gaming: woe! Help me make this workable!

Here's the layout: wife and I are in an apartment with two computers, and next door are our friendly neighbors with whom we are trying to share our wifi to save on cable-modem bills.

We're all gamers. Wife and I play a lot of World of Warcraft, neighbors play a lot of Diablo II, mostly via Battle.net. The neighbors, however, have been having nasty lag and dropped connections a lot the last few days, and I've been experiencing some pretty nasty drops and lag spikes in World of Warcraft. Anecdotal evidence suggests that these are happening at the same time when we're all playing our respective games, but don't happen solely when we're all at it -- it also occurs when only one or the other is having a go.

The wife is not seeing the problem on our non-wifi tower, though, and when I plugged into ethernet yesterday I saw the problems go away as well.

So what gives? Distance from the wireless router (currently a linksys WRT54G, previously a D-Link DI-624, switching hardware didn't seem to help any) is about 30-40 feet max for the neighbors, and about 10 feet for my own laptop. There are a couple of plaster walls between our router and the neighbors.

That I'm getting the awful lag spikes on my laptop while the ethernet-connected desktop is fine (and these lag spikes affect the whole laptop, btw, not just WoW specifically -- bandwidth falls to a sloooooow crawl on web page loads during these episodes, for example) suggests that the problem is wifi-wide and not just a distance/neighbor issue.

Is the gaming causing the problem? Are there some configurational details I need to account for? Are the inevitable packet drops just doomed to equal unplayable network games?

SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE PWNAGE!

posted by cortex to technology (12 comments total)

is the wireless router going through another router before reaching your cable modem? is your wireless network protected? do you have QoS enabled? are you getting any interference?
posted by tumult at 8:01 PM on September 24, 2005

Are you on Cable? If so perhaps local usage in general is high during the times you get dropped.
(I assume you have the wifi secured so others besides you n' neighbors don't have access)
posted by edgeways at 8:04 PM on September 24, 2005

Wi-fi has rubbish and unpredictable range, especially horizontally. Find a way to give them their own router with a wired connection.
posted by cillit bang at 8:06 PM on September 24, 2005

Couple things:

1) Get something like Kismet and scan for other wireless networks in the area. Make sure your AP's are on different channels.

2) Try different channels anyway. I think some phones use the same frequency, and I know using my microwave would drop me from the network.

3) Speaking of which... plot what items are between you and your AP. Large TV's, stereos, monitors, microwaves, blenders, etc throw out interference.

4) Do you still have two access points? You could try connecting them both up and placing one closer to your neighbor.
posted by sbutler at 8:12 PM on September 24, 2005

Details:

- Single router connected directly to the cable modem.
- no large appliances directly in line between router and neighbors -- just walls.
- Have been flirting with both WEP and no encryption.
- Depending primarily on MAC filtering to keep lazy neighbors out.

Will try changing channels. There are, for the record, several other wifi hotspots reachable from our apartment(s).
posted by cortex at 8:26 PM on September 24, 2005

I noticed considerable improvement connecting to the WiFi at my school's library when I changed the mixed-mode protection on my computer from CTS-to-self to RTS/CTS. I think this technically adds a little bit of overhead, but it helps when the computers connecting the router can hear the router's signal, but not each other. [More info from Wikipedia]

This option was in the advanced tab of the preferences for my wireless adapter. YMMV.
posted by stopgap at 10:26 PM on September 24, 2005

If WiFi has horrible horizontal range, shouldn't putting the modem on its side basically fix that? Then it would have horrible vertical range, no?
posted by five fresh fish at 2:57 AM on September 25, 2005

Someone near you has a 2.4GHz phone. When they lift the handset, your 802.11 connection goes to shit.

It's not distance or bandwidth usage. It's the fact that 2.4GHz phones use all the channels from 1-6 and they totally devastate that block of frequency.

Change your wifi router to use channel 11. This will *probably* solve your problem.

Wi-Fi does NOT have rubbish or unpredictable range, *if there's no interference*. It actually has great range, and if the FCC was not a bunch of legacy interest representatives who confine all the useful uses of the spectrum into tiny bands while allocating huge bands for non-productive uses, this problem wouldn't exist.
posted by jellicle at 6:51 AM on September 25, 2005

Specific to the Linksys WRT54G, you should also check your firmware version, and update to latest. Earlier versions of the firmware had problems interoperating with many cable services authentication schemes. Symptoms included frequently "dropped" connections and problems with packet fragmentation over the WiFi connection.
posted by paulsc at 11:47 AM on September 25, 2005

If WiFi has horrible horizontal range, shouldn't putting the modem on its side basically fix that? Then it would have horrible vertical range, no?

Well, my experience is that horizontal distance is much more important than vertical distance. Not sure why. My rule-of-thumb is that you can't expect 100% reliability if you're further away than the next room over horizontally, hence the comment.
posted by cillit bang at 4:03 PM on September 25, 2005

My wifi is incredibly shoddy on channel 11 (the default). I have a Netgear DG834G router+modem+firewall.

I changed the channel to 3 and BOOM, instant super-performance. I've done this with several of my friends routers and each had the same effect. Faster and more robust signal.

Just my 2cents
posted by lemonfridge at 12:28 PM on September 26, 2005

What happened:

We moved the router into the bedroom, which is much closer to the neighbors' apartment. Their internet experience in general has been tremendously improved.

I've started plugging in to ethernet for my weekly WoW + Skype sessions, because if I don't I inevitably get nasty lag and eventual disconnect at some point during the evening.

All is more or less well. We have to have the cable modem in the living room, so we're actually running ethernet into the bedroom to the router, and then back out to a little netgear hub, and from there into the desktop and (when necessary) the laptop.
posted by cortex at 8:47 AM on June 28, 2006