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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Hey man, I’m just speaking from 15 years of industry experience. Like I said, if you’re happy with the performance, that’s great. But I can objectively measure (and feel) the difference, so don’t go trying to tell me my personal experience is somehow invalid. People should know that there is, in fact, a difference. You’re not even addressing what I said about the latency and just getting hung up on packet loss.

    Also my internet is not expensive. My city has a municipal fiber network, and I only pay about $50/mo for symmetrical gigabit service. I don’t need to “vindicate” myself here. I don’t think people should have to settle for wireless internet to get away from Comcast when fiber is a faster option without compromises.


  • 20 packets is a very small sample size.

    ping also won’t necessarily capture all lost packets over wifi. Many are lost and re-transmitted by the wifi hardware without anything higher in the stack being aware.

    Online shooters are always a no win situation anyhow, unless you happen to be one of the top 200 players of that game in your region. Outside of that all the games place you with a bunch of similar stat players. You don’t play with all random people. You get grouped up with people like you, so you never really get to even know if you’re “one of the best” players or if you’re worse than most. You either play them to be extremely competitive and you’re one of a handful of players good enough to actually be one of the best, or you’re just playing for fun. If you’re just playing for fun then 20ms is really, really, not important.

    This is just not true. I play online shooters pretty casually, but I’ve been playing them regularly since 2001. When my ping time in Overwatch or Apex goes from the usual 35 to 55-60, it feels pretty noticeable in-game. Even though I’m nowhere near top 500. If you don’t notice the difference, that is great, but it doesn’t mean everyone else has the same experience.



  • An added 20ms is pretty noticeable in a video game. That’s more than one whole extra frame in a game running at 60 fps. Liberal use of client-side prediction means it won’t feel the same though, and instead of manifesting as delayed input response, you get more instances of being shot around corners and hits not registering.

    But the bigger problem is packet loss, which leads to occasional lag spikes. Just like with frame rates, the average latency isn’t the whole story. Those 1% lows are just as important to ensuring a smooth and consistent experience.


  • Average ping isn’t really the problem with wireless, it’s packet loss. But my concern wasn’t WiFi, which has gotten pretty good, though still prone to issues with certain home designs and building materials. My concern was cellular networks. 5G reception at my house with two different major carriers (AT&T and T-Mobile) is just OK at best, and I measure plenty of packet loss and lag spikes. It’s not a problem for my phone, but I would find that unacceptable for my home internet.

    I don’t think we will ever reach a point where wireless technologies are as good as a hard connections. All the neat tricks we use to eek more bandwidth out of wireless spectrum like time division multiple access are equally applicable to both copper and fiber optic lines. And those copper and fiber optic lines have the benefits of having much more spectrum available to use, not having to share spectrum with nearly as many devices, and not having usable spectrum limited by line-of-sight. They also benefit from not needing to share nearly as many clients over the same medium, since each individual wire is it’s own medium, rather than sharing the same RF medium as every other wireless device in your locale.