Latency and Connectivity Issues Using a Wireless Connection

I have been experiencing nasty lag spikes throughout the time that I play in the past week. My latency when on the Washington D.C. server is about 20ms on average but spikes to 1000ms or more essentially freezing the game. The pattern is rather random but seems to happen more often during encounters with large mobs or bosses. I recently purchased a wireless adapter in an effort to improve my connection (Intel Dual Band AC 7620) and it has improved slightly but the problem persists. In addition to my game being frozen periodically, I will be booted off the server at times while at other times the game will recover and return to normal.

Network Statistics using WinMTR:
http://pastebin.com/LqsfSqwF

The WinMTR shows exactly what I expected to see - it's your wireless connection which is the problem. It shows a ping as high as 640 ms to your own modem and reports minor packet loss throughout the entirety of the file. Your wireless connection is unstable.

If you're unable to connect your computer to the modem using an Ethernet cable then I'd suggest considering a powerline adapter so that you're not resorting to a wireless connection.

Currently your internet traffic is vulnerable to interference from other devices wireless connecting to the internet (e.g. your phone automatically checking for updates over WiFi), wireless devices that aren't connected to the internet (do you have a cordless phone?), and appliances which don't use any wireless functionality but cause interference (such as a microwave).

I know you're probably using a wireless connection for a reason, and that this is especially not what you want to hear after having just spent money on your wireless connection. Unfortunately this is just a fundamental weakness of wireless connections which you can't do much about, and whether it's convenient or otherwise doesn't really impact whether it's true.

It's possible to spend time attempting to find out what item in your home is responsible and replacing it, but this won't magically prevent other things from potentially causing interference in the future. It's a stopgap measure - one which might mean paying for a new microwave.

Do yourself a favour and save money in the long run - stop connecting wirelessly.

Something I feel like touching on in this topic is something which I went through recently myself. Which, afterwards seemed to have improved my latency. It may or, may not be applicable to you, but in any case, I'll elaborate. My problem occurred due to network interference from other devices, as Sarno touched on in his post.

In my household, we have a standard router provided by the ISP. This router features 2.5 GHZ and, 5 GHZ Wireless bands. 5 GHZ is the new modern wifi band, and for good reason. However, it also bottlenecks 2.5 GHZ traffic. I recently discovered this after doing some digging. My brother has a laptop and, newer generation iPhone. Both of which use the 5GHZ band. My PC, and earlier generation iPhone still use the 2.5 GHZ band. As I said, I was doing some digging, and noticed on my router that my brothers devices were obtaining about a 600+ MBPS uplink to the router each, whilst my devices were receiving 150 MBPS. This is to be expected. Fortunately, The router has an option to merge the 2.5 and, 5 GHZ bands. On my router the option was something called band filtering. After enabling the band filtering, the router began throttling my brothers devices. My latency spikes went from 1000 ms down to a mere 100 ms. Now I get roughly between 40 - 80ms latency on the Washington server.

Furthermore, I think it's more likely that there's a new device interfering with your network traffic than say you playing Path of Exile behind your Refrigerator or, Microwave. Both of which create a lot of network noise, along with Furnaces and, Laundry machines.

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SoulProcurer wrote:

Furthermore, I think it's more likely that there's a new device interfering with your network traffic than say you playing Path of Exile behind your Refrigerator or, Microwave.

Reading my post I see that I resorted to that particular example twice, which might've given the impression that I was strongly suggesting the microwave is responsible. That wasn't my intention. I was merely offering examples of sources of interference which aren't very intuitive.

Or, in other words, it would be relatively trivial to walk through the average home and point out two dozen potential problems. Different technologies have different strengths and weaknesses, and when I'm moving from one room to another while Spotify / YouTube / Twitch / whatever is playing on my phone or tablet, sure - that's a great use of wireless connectivity and I'm glad it exists.

But the most common cause of interference is probably the folks next door, and you've obviously very little control over somebody else's connection. You can try switching from 2.4 GHz to 5 GHz (or vice versa), and try using different wireless channels in your router's settings. But like I said in my previous point, fixes for wireless connectivity issues are temporary - they only work until another source of interference comes along. Online gaming is very sensitive to latency spikes and micro disconnects, which are simply a fact of life using WiFi.


tl;dr: Sure, probably not the microwave. But I still don't recommend WiFi for gaming.