Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

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United States of America Kappatain
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Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by Kappatain »

Hey guys, I'm a 2nd lt right now at level 20. I'm thinking of getting an ethernet cable, but will it actually make a big difference, considering my wifi is decent for wifi? I guess for level 35 people or really skilled players like that, having a little bit better of a connection makes a big difference. But for a level 20 like me, will it make a big difference? I do notice a few things like vils take a little delay when coming out of TC after ejecting them. Does that happen for y'all who have ethernet too? Anyways, glad to hear any input, ty :D

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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by kami_ryu »

unless you have significant command lag using wifi then there should be pretty much no difference
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by gibson »

It really depend on your specific wireless connection. I have a fast connection with a 45 MS ping that's stable wirelessly so there's not really a difference. For some people there might be though if you're far from your router, have a crappy isp etc
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by Mitoe »

I personally have noticed that my connection is more consistent when on ethernet rather than wifi—although this may be partially due to a faulty router or something of the like. I get lag spikes less often and drop less often when on ethernet, but other than that latency isn't much different.
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United States of America gustavusadolphus
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by gustavusadolphus »

Much of you experience will depend on how many people are using the wifi.
since you are not playing lan the wifi router does not need to sync the players. I personally use ethernet when i can but if it's just you on the wifi I don't think there is a noticeable difference.
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by Dolan »

Ethernet cable connection (desktop) next to the router (short cable):

Image

Wifi connection (desktop) next to the router:

Image

Wifi phone connection, in another room (walls are made of reinforced concrete):

Image

Conclusion:

Type of connection does not affect ping much. Only the bandwidth decreases if you switch to a wireless connection.

Also, if you have more devices connected to the same wifi (which is very common), each client will get a share of the total connection output. On Ethernet you get maximum possible bandwidth. Unless you have more than one PC connected via Ethernet to your router.

Wifi is also affected by interference, so if your house has reinforced concrete walls, they will "cage" the signal a bit. The further away from your router on wifi, the more interference, the weaker the wifi signal becomes. Add client connection sharing and, for example, I'm getting speeds of 7Mbps DL over the wifi on my phone (in the room which is furthest away from the router).

Big difference compared to the pics, right? You lose a lot of bandwidth the further you are in terms of distance and the more walls between you and the router.

But it also depends on the strength of the signal your router is capable of outputting. Some expensive or professional routers may have stronger signal and if you're using Wifi repeaters in the house, you might get somewhat better coverage.
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by Laurence Drake »

why do post-soviet states have better internet than i do
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by _H2O »

None of the numbers thrown out cover why you should cable connect imo.

Type of connection does affect the consistency of your internet. If you have ever had with your cellphone for example a time where you just have to refresh the page and it loads instantly. It's a time where you lost the internet for a brief window of time. In age this can cause a brief pause or spikes in latency that go away. Being cable connected prevents any weird issues from happening. Back in the day it used to be much worse, now I'm not sure how much help you get from using wifi vs cable
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by gustavusadolphus »

I think you have more than enough bandwidth on the wifi for aoe3.
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by Dolan »

_H2O wrote:Type of connection does affect the consistency of your internet.


It doesn't affect ping much. But it does affect bandwidth, as I've shown with the tests above.

If you have ever had with your cellphone for example a time where you just have to refresh the page and it loads instantly. It's a time where you lost the internet for a brief window of time. In age this can cause a brief pause or spikes in latency that go away.

Lol, that's not why you see that. What happens is that not all websites are created equal, some will load a lot of libraries and content before rendering the page. So the browser hangs waiting for the content to finish loading. Then if you refresh the previously loaded page, resources are loaded directly from the browser cache, they're not downloaded again.

The "spikes" in the wireless connection are created by interference (and if there are more clients getting signal from the same wifi router, by dynamically changing connection shares), as I've mentioned in the previous post. And, of course, if you also move around with the device, signal propagation will vary in each spot, because interference varies too.
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by gibson »

It is true though that wireless signals are much less stable. I see it all the time with people downloading Windows 10 over the Internet, where they have a sudden trough in their connection which causes a file to screwed up and often renders a portion of their machine useless. 100% of the people who's computers iv fixed who have had issues directly after installing Windows 10 have downloaded the update over wifi.
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by aaryngend »

_H2O wrote:None of the numbers thrown out cover why you should cable connect imo.

Type of connection does affect the consistency of your internet. If you have ever had with your cellphone for example a time where you just have to refresh the page and it loads instantly. It's a time where you lost the internet for a brief window of time. In age this can cause a brief pause or spikes in latency that go away. Being cable connected prevents any weird issues from happening. Back in the day it used to be much worse, now I'm not sure how much help you get from using wifi vs cable
This 100%. These ping tests are worthless because they only test for a few seconds. Yes, normally your ping is only slightly higher when using wifi over ethernet. But you don't account for the consistency, Wifi will alwasy give you spikes, and alot more jitter, that you don't have with ethernet. Please look at this blog:
http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/page/e ... ing-better

This explains it perfectly why it is always a huge difference. Saying there is no difference between wifi and ethernet is as wrong as saying ice is hot. Jitter and packet loss are the worst things for online gaming. With an ethernet cable you can remove that inconsistency.
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by JakeyBoyTH »

It really depends on your router. If you have a $400 router like one of mine, then you will get a very stable signal. I have had no trouble downloading many copies of windows many times. That said if you have a potato router, like the one IP's give you, then ethernet is definitely the best choice.

All this said, most of the lag in AoE is player based as any player can lag up the whole game. Pretty much if you have a relatively stable connection then you are fine.
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by momuuu »

On a technical side of things, ethernet vs wifi should not affect ping. Ping is the time it takes for the signal to travel from wherever you are at to the server. Even if wifi signals would theoretically travel slower than LAN signals (I believe they both just use lightspeed?) then that difference would be extremely small as the distance from your PC to the router is neglible. If I'd have to make a rough estimate, any extremely small difference in speed pingwise between LAN and wifi wouldn't even result in 0.1 extra miliseconds ping. I'd even estimate that a small difference would create at most like 0.001 ms ping. So the test results Dolan posted are what would be expected.

The problem with modern day wifi however is that the air is cluttered with all sorts of signals. It's not that destructive, but when running a test on my computer's wifi it actually found like 19 different wifi signals all spread out across a limited number of channels interfering with eachother. This vastly complex interference between all sorts of devices and different networks creates the instability that wifi is known for. I think that if the signal is generally 5/5 and there wouldn't be any interference, that there wouldn't be much difference between wifi and LAN when it comes to gaming (although with current technology the maximum transfer speed is higher with LAN I think, but that's not really relevant for gaming). I've had fine experiences gaming over wifi, and also terrible ones (at some point, the wifi receiver for my computer, the interference of other wifi networks and the relative distance of the router created very unstable internet that'd periodically have large lag spikes). It's definitely not impossible to have a good gaming experience on wifi.
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by momuuu »

gustavusadolphus wrote:I think you have more than enough bandwidth on the wifi for aoe3.

This is definitely true, aoe3 uses an extremely small amount of internet bandwidth, it's never going to be limited by wifi vs LAN. Stability of the internet connection is garantueed when on LAN while it might be unstable on wifi but it doesn't have to be unstable on wifi.
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by Dolan »

Yes, exactly. All these people who talk about connection jitter and packet loss over wifi do not take into account that this is mostly from interference in your environment. It's not necessarily from your connection (ie, ISP signal).

Your ISP internet may have small variations, but they should never be so big that you would feel that during a game. If you have connection jitter of more than 10 Mbps, your ISP may simply suck. I'm not sure how packet loss is handled in AOE3, but I've noticed that in PvP, the game freezes until the slowest player catches up with the synch. So, if there was packet loss, you'd see the game jump from one scene to another, not pick up smoothly from where it left off.

League of Legends might actually experience real packet loss lag, because the game happens in realtime on separate servers, so when you missed some packets, you're gonna re-synch with the current game scene, not with the latest you've been part of.

But AOE3 is not made like that. It literally freezes the scene until everyone catches up. It rarely happens for you to see, for example, treasure guardians change positions very suddenly in laggy games because of this re-synch I was mentioning before. But I've never seen it happen for vills or units.

@aaryngend I will do a 24 hour one hour test to see how much jitter or how big the difference between ethernet and wifi on connection stability really is. Will post the final results after 2 days later.
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by momuuu »

I dont think jitter tests on ethernet vs wifi are representative; every wifi network is different in practice.

Aoe handles lag kinda poorly in that small spikes create temporary action lag as the system tries to catch you back up in download. I've had very unstable internet where one small spike would cause lag for minutes even. A short pause would instantly fix the action lag. Almost as if aoe doesn't allow the upload/download speeds to temporarily increase to make up for the small lag spike.
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by Dolan »

@momuuu : Almost as if aoe doesn't allow the upload/download speeds to temporarily increase to make up for the small lag spike.

It probably doesn't even need or use more than 10Mbps, tbh. I don't have the game installed anymore, but I'd test to see how much bandwidth the game actually uses, just out of curiosity. I bet it never uses even 20Mbps.

I dont think jitter tests on ethernet vs wifi are representative; every wifi network is different in practice.

Of course, we don't all have the same ISP, router or wifi cards. But surely doing such a test for 24 hours in the same conditions would show something, like if these short tests are actually representative of your average connection stats taken from a longer period of time. Actually, I think I'll test only for an hour for each device and type of connection.

I'll get stats from connection with 3 US servers, so the ping will be much worse than in my tests to the closest server here.
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by aaryngend »

Dolan wrote:Yes, exactly. All these people who talk about connection jitter and packet loss over wifi do not take into account that this is mostly from interference in your environment. It's not necessarily from your connection (ie, ISP signal).

Your ISP internet may have small variations, but they should never be so big that you would feel that during a game. If you have connection jitter of more than 10 Mbps, your ISP may simply suck.

This is were you are wrong. Anything which still has no direct connection like complete fiber will experience bandwidth and ping issues from time to time, it's the law of physics. You are still using electricity in your internet line which creates electrical fields. Why do you think a fiber line can have upwards to 1.5 gigabit flawlessly at all times and your run of the mill internet can not ? It uses light, no electricity, so that issue is gone. Plus it has modern cables, not the antique copper crap. A line without jitter at all is technically impossible, it is about the severity.
If you don't have a great line, don't bother with the wifi vs ethernet test tbh. The results will be bad regardless. Ethernet vs wifi tests are used to prove that a decent line provides much better signal quality over ethernet than the same line over wifi. With wifi you cannot use 500mbit for example, there is no wifi which can passthrough such a high bandwidth. A Cat 6 ethernet cable guarantees up to 1gbit. Cat7 goes upwards to 10gbit.
Online gaming isn't about bandwidth, it is about your line handling tons of very small packets in an extremely short time.

Jerom you disappoint me :sad: . Aren't you studying physics? You should know that wifi will ALWAYS have not so optimal travel time, no matter how good the circumstances are. There is horrible and not so horrible wifi, but after all, it is wifi. Also no matter where you live, there will be interference. The only places with zero interference are caves or somewhere in the mountains i assume xd
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by momuuu »

aaryngend wrote:
Dolan wrote:Yes, exactly. All these people who talk about connection jitter and packet loss over wifi do not take into account that this is mostly from interference in your environment. It's not necessarily from your connection (ie, ISP signal).

Your ISP internet may have small variations, but they should never be so big that you would feel that during a game. If you have connection jitter of more than 10 Mbps, your ISP may simply suck.

This is were you are wrong. Anything which still has no direct connection like complete fiber will experience bandwidth and ping issues from time to time, it's the law of physics. You are still using electricity in your internet line which creates electrical fields. Why do you think a fiber line can have upwards to 1.5 gigabit flawlessly at all times and your run of the mill internet can not ? It uses light, no electricity, so that issue is gone. Plus it has modern cables, not the antique copper crap. A line without jitter at all is technically impossible, it is about the severity.
If you don't have a great line, don't bother with the wifi vs ethernet test tbh. The results will be bad regardless. Ethernet vs wifi tests are used to prove that a decent line provides much better signal quality over ethernet than the same line over wifi. With wifi you cannot use 500mbit for example, there is no wifi which can passthrough such a high bandwidth. A Cat 6 ethernet cable guarantees up to 1gbit. Cat7 goes upwards to 10gbit.
Online gaming isn't about bandwidth, it is about your line handling tons of very small packets in an extremely short time.

Jerom you disappoint me :sad: . Aren't you studying physics? You should know that wifi will ALWAYS have not so optimal travel time, no matter how good the circumstances are. There is horrible and not so horrible wifi, but after all, it is wifi. Also no matter where you live, there will be interference. The only places with zero interference are caves or somewhere in the mountains i assume xd

Yes I study physics, which is why I for one dont claim that wifi has much to do with electricity like you do. And besides, my points about travel time are exactly consistent with measurements and based on facts.

The fact of the matter is that its perfectly possible to have a stable wifi connection.
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by britishmusketeer »

No reason not to get an ethernet cable imo
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by momuuu »

britishmusketeer wrote:No reason not to get an ethernet cable imo

Unless your wifi is fine and the setup of your house makes it bothersome to get a cable connected to your pc.
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by Dolan »

@aaryngend

Where did I say that there's no difference (for gaming) between an Ethernet and wifi connection? You're addressing an argument I never made.

And you're bringing arguments I never disputed. You're talking about the limits of materials in transmitting data. Where the heck did I ever talk about or imply that Wifi could carry the same amount of data/information as a wired connection? This is just your strawman.

Of course there is inherently less network latency on fiber connections than on radio connections (which is what Wifi is). But for consumers' ordinary use cases, you're not going to reach any significant difference only due to materials. A 4ms ping on Ethernet will be a 4ms ping on Wifi.

Online gaming isn't about bandwidth, it is about your line handling tons of very small packets in an extremely short time.

And if your BW is like 15Kbps, the game will not be able to handle those packets. See, I can create strawmen too...

Bandwidth is a measure of transfer throughput, how much your connection can handle at any moment, in terms of data transfer.
Ping is a measure of latency, how fast data can be relayed back and forth between you and a server (or other peer connections, as it's the case with AOE3).

If BW is low, it doesn't matter if your ping is next to 0. You can only handle very small packets reliably. So your data may all get at the destination, but it's going to take ages for all to be transferred.
If BW is high, but ping is higher too, you can transfer a lot of data, but it's going to start with a delay (assuming it's still stable).
If ping is high and very variable, packets are going to travel at a variable pace too, but if BW is high, you're still sending large chunks of data, except that they don't get there at a steady pace.

If both BW and ping are variable (due to many causes, not just one), then this is the worst case scenario: data can get bottlenecked both in terms of quantity/sec and in terms of speed of travel.

So both BW and latency are important for gaming, dunno what you're on about.
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by _H2O »

So the CE / EE contest aside, the answer is yes cable is better and makes the game more enjoyable to play. Especially with how aoe3 handles unreliable moments in connection.
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Re: Is Ethernet significantly better than Wifi?

Post by Gear_Head »

Just a small tidbit of information to add for you guys:

I measured the bandwidth of a 1hr 15min treaty game using Tripmode. The total usage was 34 MB.

Conclusion: you can probably play this game on a really slow connection so long as the connection is reliable.

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