homeplug or wireless?

[Deleted]

I'm moving into a new house in a month or so time... the problem? no internet access anywhere near my room. I spend most of time gaming and was wonder if any of you had experience with both homeplugs and wireless and which one is the best for latency, ping and speeds? we will be getting BT Infinity at 160mb/s so it obviously needs to be able to support that speeds.

Thanks for your help, really hoping there is a decent non-wired solution here or I'm gonna be pretty annoyed.

[Sillicis]

i have experience with both. I can say the plug is a little bit better. Though we have pretty good wifi and crappy internet all together, so barely noticing difference.
However, when i was at a lan-party it deffinetly noticed the difference between plug and wifi, plug was way way faster

[The Cat]

Both Wireless and Homeplug vary significantly depending on environment. It may work for others well, but your situation may have more interference or sub-optimal electrical wiring. The only way to know how well it will work for you is to try it, unfortunately.

Personally I don't like either of them for gaming because of the instability. I use MOCA to connect my gaming computer to router... much more in line with cat5 speeds and stability. It uses coax cabling that your place is probably already wired with... so it may be another option to look at. You likely won't get 160 mbps speeds, I think I get about 90, but there will be less overhead and more consistently low latency.

[Onomatopoeia]

How well homeplug works depends on how good the electrical wiring is. Wireless can either be between good and very bad depending on lots of factors.

If you have the ability to do both, try them both out and see which is better. I've never used homeplug myself, but in my experience they are bad, but that was dealing with people in old houses.

[dicertification]

As long as your buildings wiring is in good shape. Homeplug all the way. Can always notice I'm on wireless when playing fast response multiplayer games. We still have wireless, I just don't use it on my own PC.

I should add, I have never fully tested the speed capabilities. Mine are 200mbps, and LAN transfers to my NAS rig are still speedy get right around 20MB/s according to windows file transfer.

[Deleted]

my main concern is getting the full speed really. not really sure how the 500mb/s works on the homeplug. if my internet is 160mb/s does that mean I'll be able to get the full download speed of around 20MB/s? the cabling of the house should be fine, it's a brand new build so I would imagine the sockets are in the main loop and not an extension. if it's not possible to get anywhere near full speed I guess I'll try and convince them to lay some super thin cat6 cables under the carpets.

[Rennadrel]

Wireless N is faster then the Powerline kits that you can get, however it doesn't have the connection stability that the Powerline connections have in newer houses. I get just as fast of download speeds on my 100 Mbps Linksys Powerline as my dad and brother do on Wireless N on their laptops, which is 25 Mbps (max download speed for my connection). Wireless has a tendency to time out frequently which makes it a pain for gaming and downloading, however it's otherwise every bit as good as using a Powerline, assuming the house is newer anyway. Older buildings might not work well with the Powerline, but at the same time older buildings might also interfere with wireless signals too, reducing the strength of your signal.

[TyloBedo]

I would go for powerline simply because of how much interference wifi gets. In my house if the microwave comes on wireless is almost unusable. Garage door opens? Hello +500 ping for the next 15 seconds.

[bluejaye]

powerline adapters are very dependent on the quality of the electrical hardware in your house. Houses that are older and have aging powerlines are going to see a lot of latency. I have also heard that they can sometimes have issues going from 1 zone to another in your house if it has more than 1.

Personally if you have to pick, I would get a very good router and use that. if you're worried about interference, get a dual band router with a good range and you should be good to go. Most routers will support throughput speeds much faster than your actual internet connection anyway, so if you get one that allows you to have a strong signal and little interference you should be fine.

I gamed on wireless for years and the router was upstairs and on the other side of the house. I never lagged, and never noticed the wifi... LAN was obviously faster but not enough of a difference to notice when gaming.

[n0cturnal]

When it comes to 100Mb/s and higher I would never ever use WiFi.
Setting up a WiFi network that doesn't limit your connection at those speeds requires some serious equipment.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwa...67-5-ghz-dn-40

[lordmatthias]

I have used both, I do typically prefer running on a LAN connection instead of a WAN connection. Wireless typically does induce a little higher latency although for gaming your actual throughput shouldn't really matter as most games don't use that much bandwidth. The only time I noticed significant lag while running on wifi was when I was hosting borderlands games from my laptop. I tested with both wifi and wired connections and it did actually make a difference.

I personally prefer wired connections over wireless but I use both depending on what device I am using and what application I am using it for. I am currently in the process of running CAT6 cable throughout my house back to a 16port gig switch, until that is complete I am just running a 50ft patch cable from my router to my office where I have a a little 5 port gig switch to connect all the wired devices, you may be able to do something similar.