Be Excellent To Each Other

Can someone help me with science?

I use a wired internet connection to my PS3. A friend uses wireless.

My friend is saying that he would get the same internet speed regardless of whether his signal strength is low or high. He says that the speed it's only affected if it cuts out completely.

He says:-


I say this is tosh.. surely if you have a low signal strength, then the internet speed suffers too?

What's the truth?

You're right. He's talking arse.

I get rubbish wireless speeds on my laptop when I'm upstairs - it's better near the router downstairs.

What's this got to do with Wired stuff? And he's talking shit. I think he's wrong about phones, too.

It stems from me saying that my wired connection is "better" than his wireless connection.

It gets far more petty than this I can assure you.

Your wired connection is better than a wireless one. Far, far better.

I mean, straight off the bat it's faster, so I can't really see where his argument can go after that.

wired is faster, more reliable, generally cheaper and more secure. With fixed kit if you can run a cable, you should.

You'd think that wouldn't you but we are dealing with two people who are quite stubborn here.

If it was a laptop, I could see his point. But unless he carries his PS3 around with him, I don't thi
Just invite him here and we'll drop some science.

Phones also degrade as signal strength drops, it's just that voice isn't much data to being with and they compress it (both acoustically and filesizily) to buggery. They also apply other maths to assist the brain, which is quite good these days at picking human speech out of noise. It's had a couple of years to get it right.

He's talking complete shit. Also, the PS3 is quite well known for being shit at wlan. Mine certainly is.

Oh, and in terms of speed - a wired connection is faster than wlan yes, but unless you're still using senile old 802.11b then wlan will have higher throughput than your internets anyway (except Virgin's 50mbps one, maybe).

The problem comes in latency - wlan isn't full duplex, so a device can send or receive, whereas wired can do both at once. And wlan, even at full strength, is overcoming all sorts of interference, and has higher overhead. It's quite likely that a wlan will increase the ping. Only the very worst of wired connections (or ones run over the mains; mine can be pretty shocking, but isn't usually noticeable) will do that.

Wireless can easily reach 30Mbps sustained, so if you have say average of 4Mbps broadband then unless your wireless is really rubbish, it wont make much difference - you will still download at 4Mbps.

As to phones - the compression on the voice means that it uses only a fraction of the full 'good signal' bandwidth, so you can degrade a fair bit & still get through. On very low signals you get distorted sound, but the compression is designed to still be legible as speech when half the bits are missing - the ear/brain combo is good at coping with a noisy signal.

Computers however, aren't, and what is an inaudable glitch to you on the phone is a full packet lost for a computer. It's like chalk and the other stuff...

Mine's alright as far as straight forward connecting to the Internet goes, but then the router is in the room directly beneath it. It's absolutely gash for streaming stuff over to it from my PC though, unless you like having little pauses every 3 seconds when you're listening to music or watching movies. If it were practical, I'd go for cables every time.

Bellends?
Mine's appalling - from 2 metres across open air downloading firmwares and things took an absolute age. As soon as I hooked it over homeplug, everything started flying. A laptop in the same room is fine.

No, he's right about phones.

A voice comms signal sent over a GSM cellphone network can run at one of a couple of data rates, usually 4.8k (half-rate GSM codec). If the signal is too low to carry that, you get no signal. If it's strong enough, you get signal. It's a binary state, more or less.

WiFi data signals (and indeed 3G data for that matter) can run at a few dozen different speed steps, and will throttle the speed up or down to compensate for poor signal or take advantage of a strong signal. Most routers will report the genuine connection speed. For example, if I stand next to my 802.11n router with my Macbook, it reports (say) 140meg. If I fire up the PS3 that immediately drops to 54meg (as the PS3 is 802.11g and so slows the entire network down to g-grade speeds). If I then also turn my iPhone on and move to the far end of the house, it'll slow down to below 10meg as it strains to allow the iPhone to connect.

The details of how they do this will involve an understanding of frequency and time division multiplexing. Basically, the guard bands increase in size.

Not in all cases; 802.11n can beat 100meg Ethernet. Although the PS3 only has .11g of course.

Pfh, and what would you know? Have you got a PhD or something?

That's possibly the least worthwhile comment of the day
We could do some more, too:
.11g is faster than 10meg Ethernet.
.11b is faster than a serial connection.

As for all the "but it's faster than your Internet connection, so that's fine" comments, what happens when you want to stream a film from your PC?

That never happens! Because my PC lives next to my xbox.

I'm jut going to wade in on the side of ignorance here with a couple of questions of my own.
My Xbox is connected to the router wirelessly while Jens is wired. My Xbox is the one which reports a moderate NAT if both of them aren't showing open (Which we only acheived for about 24 hours at the weekend).
So would it make a difference if I connected mine by wire?

Doubtful. I suspect that due to the way NAT works, you could only have both of them running with 'good NAT' if you put them in the DMZ.

I have yet to come across a router which has the ability to put two devices in the DMZ.

UPnP is supposed to fix all this. For instance, I can be signed into MSN on two laptops, while Charl is also signed into MSN on one of those two laptops, all because they negotiate with the router.

Some routers uPnP capability isn't up to the task.

See if Gill's ISP provided multiple external IP addresses, would that help solve the NAT issues if her router supported them?

Xbox networking is all screwy though, there's a couple of my friends who can never join games I'm hosting, and I can never join one of theirs. So long as someone else is hosting, it's all fine for everyone.

I don't know very much about networking because it's one part of PC stuff I could never be arsed with. But surely if my wireless speed is 54mbps and my broadband speed is 6mbps it would make no difference?

Over a network it does yes. But for the internet (which is what most use it for) it should be 10x or so more than adequate enough to provide your full 5m internet speed?

I assigned ips manually and put the ip for my 360 into the router's DMZ, but it still reports the NAT as strict. When I played cod4 online the other day i swapped the cables so the 360 was running straight from the cable modem and the NAT was reported as open. Either way didn't seem to affect the multiplayer experience that much though (but i remember having issues with TF2 a while back)

I need to look into this further.

That's to do with NAT. People with strict NAT settings cannot join games with other people with strict NAT. People with strict NAT can join games hosted by open NAT users with no problems, which makes them think that their settings are ok.

I have no idea about how moderate NAT settings affects things.

I don't know what DMZ means so I'll just power on

last weekend, we noticed that my NAT was being reported as strict and Jens as moderate and this was basically stopping us from playing online at all. We reset the router and ended up both having open NATS which lasted a day or two until the beginning of this week when mine went back to moderate.
So it is obviously possible for us both to have it.
I'm going to change ISP soon anyway but don't know how to find who is best for solving this.

DeMilitarized Zone. Basically it's not protected by any kind of firewall, so it's not a good idea to put a Windows PC in it, for example. The upshot is that you don't have to worry about opening up ports and shit.

I'm pretty sure mine is open NAT. Though I've probably not checked since I switched to the O2 router, actually - and the most persistent failure is with another O2 customer.

Annoyingly I can't put mine in the DMZ without fucking about with the inner firewall for the Media Centre PC and my laptop, and I can't be arsed.

FTFY