Improving home network

[Matthew Waring]

In our house we have many different devices connected to the network via wifi. I have connected my desktop to the network via a powerline adapter. My family are complaining that they are getting slow download and dropping signal because I am 'hogging' the network because I play games. Is there any truth to this?

[Windows7ge]

That depends on the plan they pay for and how much bandwidth you're actually using. Both of which you haven't specified.

[Lurick]

What download and upload speeds do you have?

How many wireless devices?

What router?

Most games will only use 1-2Mbps when actually playing online at most so unless you have really bad upload/download speeds or are streaming and downloading stuff as well then there isn't any truth to this.

[Matthew Waring]

Apologies,

We have a virgin media router with 200 down and around 20 up.

[Lurick]

4 minutes ago, Matthew Waring said:

Apologies,

We have a virgin media router with 200 down and around 20 up.

How many wireless devices do you have connected?

[Matthew Waring]

Oh it must be easily over 15 devices. I recommended that we setup a wired network in the house but nobody agrees with me.

[Lurick]

Just now, Matthew Waring said:

Oh it must be easily over 15 devices. I recommended that we setup a wired network in the house but nobody agrees with me.

Yah, with a single router that's probably got a less than ideal wireless chipset in it I doubt the Virgin Media router can handle that many things. While not a perfect analogy think of it like this, wireless is like a one lane road where people can go both ways but not at the same time and only one vehicle at a time. Wireless is half duplex so only one thing can send or receive at a time and that's it. The more devices the more the air time has to be divided up to give the other devices a chance to "speak". Overload a low quality router with too many devices and you'll end up with disconnects, slow speeds, and other issues.

[Matthew Waring]

Just now, Lurick said:

Yah, with a single router that's probably got a less than ideal wireless chipset in it I doubt the Virgin Media router can handle that many things. While not a perfect analogy think of it like this, wireless is like a one lane road where people can go both ways but not at the same time and only one vehicle at a time. Wireless is half duplex so only one thing can send or receive at a time and that's it. The more devices the more the air time has to be divided up to give the other devices a chance to "speak". Overload a low quality router with too many devices and you'll end up with disconnects, slow speeds, and other issues.

Thanks for the clarification, he came out with the statement that his girlfriend had worked in networking for 4 years and agreed that me playing games was hogging all the network bandwidth when he uses for games, streaming netflix at the same time. 

[Lurick]

3 minutes ago, Matthew Waring said:

Thanks for the clarification, he came out with the statement that his girlfriend had worked in networking for 4 years and agreed that me playing games was hogging all the network bandwidth when he uses for games, streaming netflix at the same time. 

Yah, playing games on a 200/20 connection is not going to cause issues. Even streaming Netflix is 30Mbps (iirc) for 4K and wouldn't cause any problems. I actually work as a network engineer and I'll tell you right now that their statement is bullcrap, playing games doesn't use much bandwidth at all.

The only way you could possibly be causing them any problems, based on the information provided, is if your powerline was somehow blasting out EMI when you were gaming which I HIGHLY doubt, or if you were doing some intense downloading as well while you gamed.

[manikyath]

3 minutes ago, Lurick said:

Yah, playing games on a 200/20 connection is not going to cause issues. Even streaming Netflix is 30Mbps (iirc) for 4K and wouldn't cause any problems. I actually work as a network engineer and I'll tell you right now that their statement is bullcrap, playing games doesn't use much bandwidth at all.

The only way you could possibly be causing them any problems, based on the information provided, is if your powerline was somehow blasting out EMI when you were gaming which I HIGHLY doubt, or if you were doing some intense downloading as well while you gamed.

i'm a support engineer.. and can confirm about every aspect of this to be true.

- people think gaming eats up their internet like a fat person at taco bell.

- people think wifi is magic and wired networks are completely unnecessary

- people cant possibly imagine the ISP provided box is whatever cheapest thing they could buy in bulk

- when you work in IT, people somehow always think they know better than the people they pay to solve their shit.

[ReapyBoi]

i'm with sky and found that you can't swap routers but some asus routers can be connected via Ethernet, this means the devices can be spread across routers, lot less messy than a wired connection, I have a BT flex 500 going into a asus N16( the other one goes into the provided router) router that has edited to have the same ssid and different channel and i almost get full speeds across the house with 8-12 devices connected. If your interested in how i set it up get in touch and ill talk you through it.

[YaBoiWill]

My sister uses a Virgin box at her house, which she shares with 5 others, and they must have at least 15 devices if not more, when I set it up it was pretty good speeds, as I was the only one there working on all the problems in the house. Now they've all moved in, she says it dog shite speed, and streaming anything is out of the question. 

I don't think Virgin hubs are anything special

[Alex Atkin UK]

I don't trust any router that has internal antennas.  It makes it so much harder to position the router so its beaming out optimally.

 

I switched my friends Virgin Hub into modem mode and stuck a router on it with OpenWRT and SQM QoS enabled and it drastically improved the reliability dramatically.