Hi all, I'm in the crap situation whereby I am in a flat and the router is downstairs, divided by walls made of adamantium or god knows what. As a result, playing online games induces drop-outs and lag that is reminiscent of when I was a child trying to play CounterStrike with movements that can only be likened to ice-skating. One solution is to use HomePlugs, but I was just wondering who (if anyone) on here uses them for gaming, and their thoughts and/or recommendations. I mainly play BF3 and soon to be Planetside 2 online, so the less lag the better (all our motto's). Additionally, I have a decent broadband connection (O2/BeUnlimited All Rounder, about 2-3MB/s when torrenting linux distros...). Thanks all!
home plugs are much much better than Wi-Fi for lag. They are not perfect but they will be fine unless your ping mad. www.solwise.co.uk do some decent ones. just make sure you get 200Mb+ ones as they usually market them traffic in 1 direction. so 200mpbs is actually a 100Mb line in real terms.
Tibby I have homeplugs for the same reasons, works really well! I get full downspeed (30Mbps) even with both homeplugs being on extensions (something that is advised NOT to do). I've only seen drops when I have the homeplug into an extension of an extension! Really easy to setup (press a button on each plug to link up). I bought this kit and couldn't recommend enough; http://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-Link-TL-PA211KIT-200Mbps-Powerline-Ethernet/dp/B004INVKP4
I was running a pair a good while back and had no issues with them, if I had any lag it wasn't the homeplugs which caused it. They were an old 85mbps set running on the Homeplug 1.0 standard, anything more recent should be fine. What I will say, though, is don't turn them off, just leave them running. They seem to be much happier just being left alone.
Indeed 200Mbps is fast enough - do you have any NAS drives? This is the only issue I could see when using the homeplugs. If it can manage your ISPs max speed then what else do you need?
I have a fileserver and a Pi on the way, but those will both be hardwired into the router (although I may need a switch soon by the sounds of it).
I word of caution though - I tried homeplugs to bridge the network between my study and the lounge, but because they were on different breakers in the fuse box, the plugs couldn't communicate. This could of course be bacause of the ancient wiring in my flat Ended up using a wireless bridge as close as I could get to the router.
Upstairs and downstairs is on a different breaker loop, as would be in 99% of the houses out there (I'm not a leccy, so I might be misunderstanding terminology). I'll purchase and hope for the best, but I think someone in my building had some and they said it works fine.
I have two downstairs and one upstairs in the study, cant talk them up enough they have freed me from the horror of day to day wifi. I have the 200mbps TP link ones which are fine.
I use homeplugs, my housemates use them, my friends use them, my parents use them. They are excellent! Say goodbye to WiFi nightmares!
I've long used a set of three 85mbps from Solwise i.e. for over 6 years. Work perfectly. One thing to note - you get diminishing returns with more devices. They are a 'shared hub' of total 200mbps (or 500 or whatever version you buy) meaning all stations transmitting down the electric wires share the total bandwidth. If its just you to your router you'll be fine - but add another device which is also active and you're going to be sharing your bandwidth with that device.
I switched to homeplugs a year ago and boy oh boy do I just love having them. 200meg TP Link does the job. I have on the same ring main. All connected upstairs so no issues with crossing between one ring main and another. The issue is quite simple. Imagine this image above represents the wiring in your house, the ring mains are the labeled Upstairs Downstairs and Lights. The Larger box connecting the two is supply I forgot to label it. Whilst they cross because they are all supplied power from the same source they do not connect together what so ever on each ring main. On those connections you have several plug sockets connected, lights are usually on their own ring main also. I tried to make it very simple. Though I do not see there being an issue. I know in my house it does not work at all for some reason. I tried it but oh well was for my father when our wireless went down. All I can say is ping sming, and downloading stuff is all pretty fast too.
just depends on the level of gaming your talking about your not going to see 20-50ms pings using home plugs and the best you can hope for will be something between 80-150ms depending on the quality of your internel socket wire. If its a new build you will be closer to 80ms but in older homes the quality of the wire is pretty poor normally.
I get max of 50ms ping on homeplugs to most UK/EU based battlefield 3 servers. I have a 60 meg connection and before that had 20meg and had around the same ping.
I regularly get pings below the speeds posted, I also found speeds in my previous house better and it was older. Too many variables to be able to make a solid case either way, I would imagine developers skimping on copper in a lot of new builds.
As an example of my current ping I used pingtest.net. For some reason packet loss could not be tested. I have no idea why. But to this server alone I have a low ping. Gaming obviously varies. As the data being exchanged is in constant flux.
I've been using Netgear 200Mbps homeplugs for about a year now. I'm the only one in the house on them and there's been no noticable difference in ping or connection quality compared to those on ethernet.
