It's ok we understood you.
Check your drivers and if necessary change your cable and see if it improves. If not it needs diagnosed further. If you are happy with wifi there's no reason to go cabled, but it is curious you see degraded results.
WiFi or Cable connection to router?
- Thread starter peterbbb
- Start date
It's ok we understood you.
Check your drivers and if necessary change your cable and see if it improves. If not it needs diagnosed further. If you are happy with wifi there's no reason to go cabled, but it is curious you see degraded results.
As I said, depends on the router and how many devices, as well as the distance from the router, any walls, and any lead in the walls, and most importantly the network card.
[Edit] I did think you meant your wireless was more stable than wired, but as others seemed to have ignored that I thought I must have miss-understood.
As above, probably drivers, but could also just be a poor network card. HP are renowned for it, as are Dell.
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Thanks for all the very helpful responses. Re tried and it is a consistent issue. The wired is worse stability than the wifi. I am going to rerun a cable to the computer from the router to see if it is that which causes the problem. Drivers are fine. The cable was fine when it connected my skybox to the internet. On-demand was fine. Thanks again.
Never use Wifi for gaming. very unreliable.
Yaffle
Volunteer Moderator
The BT Homehub I was given (now binned) had only one gigabit port, the other three (four?) were 10bit.
I think it had a different colour, or may have been specifically labelled.
Lots of other posts have highlighted possible cable/driver/adapter issues giving instability on a wired connection, so I'm not going to go there. There is one other reason why, in this particular context, your WiFi might appear more stable than using a wired connection.
As others have pointed out, unless you're running wireless-n at relatively short ranges and in a fairly "clean" RF environment then your wired connection to your router is almost certainly higher bandwidth than your WiFi.
This makes for much higher performance internal to your network, but you're experiencing instability over the end-to-end paths between you, FDEV's servers and any in-game peers you may have. The bottleneck in that path is almost certainly your uplink to your ISP. For inbound data, that's never going to be a problem for you as your internal network can suck down data faster than the downlink from the ISP can deliver it, whether its destination machine is on WiFi or wired. Too great a delta between the amount of data you can push to your router over a given pipe and the rate atwhich your router can upload it, however, can - under very specific circumstances - cause a problem.
In order to upload data incoming from a faster link over a slower one, your router must buffer it and send it on as fast as it can until it catches up and empties the buffer. So what happens if you connect a firehose to a bucket being drained by a drinking straw and the bucket fills up? Different routers handle this differently, some better than others, but in many cases - particularly on lowest-bidder consumer grade products - the extra incoming packets will just end up silently dropped so if this is your uplink to an E: D server or peer you'll see packet loss and disconnects.
This is a gross oversimplification of the potential situation, but accurate enough unless I'm talking to a fellow network administrator
As others have pointed out, unless you're running wireless-n at relatively short ranges and in a fairly "clean" RF environment then your wired connection to your router is almost certainly higher bandwidth than your WiFi.
This makes for much higher performance internal to your network, but you're experiencing instability over the end-to-end paths between you, FDEV's servers and any in-game peers you may have. The bottleneck in that path is almost certainly your uplink to your ISP. For inbound data, that's never going to be a problem for you as your internal network can suck down data faster than the downlink from the ISP can deliver it, whether its destination machine is on WiFi or wired. Too great a delta between the amount of data you can push to your router over a given pipe and the rate atwhich your router can upload it, however, can - under very specific circumstances - cause a problem.
In order to upload data incoming from a faster link over a slower one, your router must buffer it and send it on as fast as it can until it catches up and empties the buffer. So what happens if you connect a firehose to a bucket being drained by a drinking straw and the bucket fills up? Different routers handle this differently, some better than others, but in many cases - particularly on lowest-bidder consumer grade products - the extra incoming packets will just end up silently dropped so if this is your uplink to an E: D server or peer you'll see packet loss and disconnects.
This is a gross oversimplification of the potential situation, but accurate enough unless I'm talking to a fellow network administrator
For the amount of data the game shifts isn't the connection speed pretty irrelevant? My Internet connection is a rock solid 5.8Mbps with Sky but with my PC on WiFi it's connection was prone to drop outs. I now run homeplugs and it never drops off. Although I often moan about my speed, followed by 'I must sort out fiber', which I never get round to, my connection is fantastic.
Why your WiFi connection is better than wired I can't think, maybe the Nic is dodgy, or the cable as has been mentioned above.
Why your WiFi connection is better than wired I can't think, maybe the Nic is dodgy, or the cable as has been mentioned above.
Anne Otherplayer
Banned
That is not correct, the internet connection speed is the bottleneck and it is rated at 156, but you also have the server end connection and number of clients connected to take into account, it can and will be a lot slower that the rated max speed on all sites. You are most likely getting a lot less than you think you are, plus the wired connection will be faster for you to get to the router. You might look into a google fiber connection.
My turn to be a nitpick
Mb is always Megabit while MB is MegaByte. If you're losing throughput on a cable that's over 1m you have problems.Cat 5/5e/6 are rated up to 100m before degradation occurs, depending on NICs and no interference obviously.
As others have said it is most likely your cable. We tend to buy the cheapest, and to be fair most places sell low quality cables at a high price to the public. Go and have a chat with your friendly company network admins, they might even just let you take a decent cable home for "testing" 
A nitpick of your nitpick: Megabits
More nits to be picked! 10/100 means the wired connection is dual speed (it can do 10 or 100). This has nothing to do with wireless, which uses an entirely different scheme. Not that you said it... just sayin.
I never said it did, that was discussing wired speeds, not wireless.
I have 100Mb Download Speed.
But, my gaming rig is only on Wifi. Works great for me.
Slim
But, my gaming rig is only on Wifi. Works great for me.
Slim
When using WiFi all sorts of things can effect the connection speed. Distance from the router and obstructions like walls being the main culprits. Radio interference is another, including from other near by WiFi signals on the same channel (neighbours routers).
I doubt this is the case but Microwave ovens operate on the same frequency and obliterate WiFi connection speeds as do video senders (I fell victim to the video sender problem and it was only after my ISP sent me a new router that I still couldn't connect to over WiFi that I worked out my cheapskate solution to sky multi-room was the problem! Changing the frequency on the video sender fixed that)
If you want to stick to WiFi you can by WiFi extenders from the likes of PC world or if you want use a cabled connection but without trailing a long cable you can by Ethernet over power adapters.
EDIT: Opps I just read further posts and now realise that you have the opposite problem...
Can't think what would be causing your problem, a duff driver or perhaps a very poor quality cable near a strong source of electromagnetic interference... :S
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Again, many thanks to all of you for your responses and suggestions. I'll update this thread with the outcome of some new cabling to the computer. I have worked out the route for the cable, bedroom to kitchen via the upstairs loo! I am in a grade II listed home so i have to be rather careful about what I do re holes in walls etc.
My BT HomeHub router has four cable connections but all seem to be the same. They are the same colour.
My BT HomeHub router has four cable connections but all seem to be the same. They are the same colour.