Multiple users

[Owen D]

Hello,
I have a long-distance problem, which I kind of though it would never be solved, so I let got of it for a while.
Now, it really annoying when it happens and I figured that maybe I will get in this forum an advice.
So the things is, I am currently at a house which has many electronic devices, and all of them are daily connected to my router through WI-FI.
The main users are 3 'heavy' computers that are mainly used everyday for gaming. I am one of the three. We are all connected via WI-FI, so I guess it splits between us and we get a reasonable connection.
Because of the fact that all three of us are using the internet for heavy gaming, when we are connected together it really slows down the connection and I get immediately high pings on the game and a big amount of lags.
But, I can tell you that when the internet is not under a stress, and I am the only one who uses it, it's very powerful and smooth. VERY low pings and quick web browsing.
I can tell right away when they log on to their computers and their games when it all of a sudden starts lagging hard and my ping is raised. Something that you really can't deal with and not letting you play normally.
Is there a way to overcome this multi-users problem?
 

[don_svetlio]

Ethernet

[Owen D]

6 hours ago, don_svetlio said:

Ethernet

Unfortunately, Ethernet is not an option. I have to stick with WI-FI here.
The Router itself is currently in a room near mine, like 10-20 meters away, and I can't think of a way to plug enthernet cable from the router to my pc as I am not able to move it any other place than where it's now. The solution will probably have to be for me and mates both, so we all use WI-FI but connection will not be affected. I can't really take it to myself and fix the problem just for me, and all of the others are still confronting the issue.
The problem is that much bad, that we all started using the data plan in our phones to play the pc games

[Belgiangurista]

The router is the bottleneck if I understand your situation correctly. Or to be specific the MIMO (capability) of the router.

 

MIMO= Multiple input Multiple output (MIMO wiki)

MU-MIMO= Multi-user Multiple input multiple output

 

The simultaneous wireless streams act like a Walkie-talkie, Only one can speak at a time, the other has to wait for his turn. I think you can resolve the  issue simple: add another router to the existing one, just connect it on one of the LAN ports and have the WiFi of that router to yourself. 

 

Another option is to use powerlines and not be dependant on the WiFi.

[Owen D]

On 8.3.2016 at 0:10 AM, Belgiangurista said:

The router is the bottleneck if I understand your situation correctly. Or to be specific the MIMO (capability) of the router.

 

MIMO= Multiple input Multiple output (MIMO wiki)

MU-MIMO= Multi-user Multiple input multiple output

 

The simultaneous wireless streams act like a Walkie-talkie, Only one can speak at a time, the other has to wait for his turn. I think you can resolve the  issue simple: add another router to the existing one, just connect it on one of the LAN ports and have the WiFi of that router to yourself. 

 

Another option is to use powerlines and not be dependant on the WiFi.

Thank you very much, I'll see what I can do with this information. Very useful.

 

[Razor512]

Are you using a mixed client setup (many 802.11a, n, ac clients)? Different routers handle the mixed client workload differently, but for a reasonably modern router, it will take quite a few clients fora major latency issue to take place on the LAN side.

 

When everyone is online, are you able to monitor the throughput at the WAN port of the router? When saturation takes place, if things like ack packets are being delayed or dropped due to saturation of the upstream or downstream, then network lag will become very noticeable when gaming, even if bulk transfers continue to run quickly.

Some traffic also just doesn't play well with latency sensitive applications, for example, you can have a torrent download making 5000 connections and only using 20% of your total throughput, and cause lag issues. In those situations, a little QOS will go a long way.

 

 

I am not sure which router you are using, but for this example, I set up 3 client devices, and I will have each one attempt to simultaneously upload and download as fast as they can. The router is a Netgear R7000, everything is on the 5GHz band, and I have 1 802.11ac client (2 stream), an 802.11n 2 stream adapter (N600), and 1 single stream N150 on the 5GHz band.

This represents a worst case, as the router is dealing with a mixed client environment, and each wants to use as much airtime as possible. The router is still able to handle it reasonably well, though the 802.11ac client ends up dominating.

 

edit: forgot to disable those annoying good neighbor policies on some of the WiFi adapters, crappy requirements causes less optimal use of the available air time when there are other access points in range.

 

 

If all of the clients are 802.11ac

1 AC1200 (2stream) and 2 AC600 clients), the throughput distribution becomes more even, and it goes up slightly.

(pair 5 and 6 are from my smartphone which while having slower speeds, it is very consistent).