Ask HN: How to improve WiFi for cloud gaming? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to improve WiFi for cloud gaming?

12 pointsNikolaNovak7 comments

I used to have a fairly elaborate system of vlans and access points and switches and so on. After we switched to Bell fiber in Toronto Canada, we just use their home hub 3000

Performance is good but flakey. We live in a house but it's heavily saturated by neighbours blasting their WiFi. My throughput is great but latency and connectivity are super inconsistent.

Googling mostly gives useless entry level suggestions many of which are practically wrong - just set up transmission to extra high everywhere.

Any tips on how to actually make a good WiFi coming off bell home hub, on particular for phone cloud gaming?

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First off, the best way to make wifi work better is to use wired ethernet instead. Many homes that aren't wired for ethernet do have two pair telephone wiring which can be repurposed for 100M ethernet (easier if it's star topology, run to an accessible central location, but doable with daisy chained too), or coax wiring that can run MoCA.

If not, try to figure out what channels are used least by your neighbors and use those. For gaming, latency and jitter are more important than bandwidth (mostly), so prefer smaller channels/don't aggregate. Indoor only channels have lower power limits, so you should see less contention on them. DFS (radar detection required) channels are a pain to use, but if they're usable in your area, you'll likely see less contention, because they're a pain to use. 2.4Ghz channels are probably not worth it for gaming if you've got neighbors.

Thx - I do use Ethernet for primary laptop and desktop. But family uses WiFi and I'd like to do cloud gaming on phone and tablet. Maybe even upcoming steam deck etc :-)

Using ethernet as a backbone for multiple access points, so you can have one in the rooms they will likely be in can help too. Some phones and tablets can use a USB wired NIC too ;)

You could get a mesh wifi network, like Plume pods. They actively monitor the wifi environment, change frequencies, and pick which node to send from based on signal strength and interference. Even better if you can run Ethernet to the pods so they don't have to find additional open channels for backhaul.

Metal barriers (like the silver on the back of a mirror) really kill radio transmission and are good to put between you and interference sources.

I am a fan of Ubiquiti gear, particularly the higher end hubs can use channels that are usually blocked because of the potential to interfere with weather radar around airports. Better hubs can move frequency if there is a problem so they can use a vast area of the 5Ghz band that is usually unused so less interference.

Multiple hub systems are also good because two devices on different channels don’t fight for one channel. Even if the second hub has a worse connection than the first hub the benefit of having a less congested hub is usually worth it.

If you use Apple products don't forget to turn off location services. These actually temporary disable WiFi and start scanning networks in order to figure out the location. Pretty terrible for cloud gaming.

Wifi 6E is just the same as regular Wifi 6 but with way more frequencies available. Would you be able to set up one AP and one client device with 6E on an unused channel?

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