Last night, my son was angry that the WIFI connection was slow and that while he could get online, he couldn't engage in a with his cousin's game. Don't ask me the specifics, the bottomline was that the XBox was in the basement, the router in the study and he felt the distance made the WIFI unworkable. He wanted to move the Xbox to another TV hoping a closer TV to the router would solve his problem. The problem may be in the technology and not the router or the distance. "Most customers get little more than 50% of the capacity promised by their Wi-Fi routers, says Dr. Alex Hills, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who built the first big Wi-Fi network. That speed is further slowed if multiple people try to use a network, he says."
With multiple devices using the WIFI, there may be little we can do other than to add a modem to the basement to get him a direct connection. The WIFI is slow, while a direct connection could solve the problem. But getting the cable company to provide another modem may not be ideal. Other ideas could be a newer router although ours is only a couple year old or a repeater in the basement to try and boost his signal. "Mr. Boote and his friends, who subscribe to 15 megabits-per-second Comcast broadband in addition to TV, bought two 'powerline adapters,' which extend the range of their Wi-Fi signal by tapping into electrical power lines inside the house. Devices, like an Xbox or TV, can be plugged into the adapter via a cord to provide similar high speeds to what they would get if connected directly to a router." I may have to go a similar route to get his Xbox working properly.
Andy... I do BPL. On a 30 megabit line, I get 5 megabits from the BPL solution.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is that there are usually anywhere from 8-20 points in the route between your device and the server it's trying to communicate with, most of them just handing off your traffic as it goes up the ISPs network structure to a backbone through a couple of backbone hops, then down the network on the other side to reach the server. Then the process happens in reverse as the server's response wends its way back to you. Normally, this time can be counted in milliseconds (if you do speedtest.net, you'll often see that you can ping a nearby test server in 10-15 milliseconds). But if the server on the other side is slow or there's a bottleneck happening in any of those 8-20 other points in your data's route there or back, your data can slow to a crawl.
If your speed at the XBox is normally zippy, periodic slowdowns are usually due to an external issue, not your home network.