Networking Advice

brainiac

Hey folks,

Looking for some opinions / advice on my current networking setup. I am with Virgin Media on the 240MB/s Fibre package. I use most of my devices upstairs away from the modem (which is a Virgin Media Hub 3.0). As such, for the last couple of years I've had a powerline setup (TP-Link AV500, non-Gigabit ports) which has worked sufficiently well in that time.

Over the last couple of months, I've upgraded to a 4k TV and a Nvidia Shield for game streaming as well as 4k video streaming. Most of the time, everything still works. However, some 4k content does buffer a lot / struggle with continuous playback.

More importantly, for some reason, game streaming from PC to Shield is only usable when both devices are connected to powerline to reduce latency / ping numbers despite the shield itself getting MUCH better speeds if it was on 5GHz wireless.

Here's an idea of speeds on different devices:
- Galaxy S8 5GHz - 180-200Mbps
- Galaxy S8 2.4GHz - 40-50Mbps
- PC Wireless 2.4GHz - 40-50Mbps
- PC Ethernet to Powerline - 58-70Mbps
- Nvidia Shield 5GHz - 135-150Mbps
- Nvidia Shield Ethernet to Powerline 38-43Mbps

So TL/DR, my 5GHz wireless band works brilliantly, but all my devices bar Shield and Phone don't support it (TV, PS4, PC etc..). The powerline only gives marginal increases over the 2.4GHz band but provides a lot more stability than 2.4GHz wifi.

In an ideal world, I would like my shield to be on the 5GHz wireless band or receiving those same speeds via power line. As I mentioned though, if the shield isn't wired up to the powerline along with the PC, I cannot stream games across the network.

Is there anywhere I can go from here to increase speeds across the board? Or at the very least for the PC / Shield combination issues. The thoughts I've had are getting a new 5GHz Wi-fi card for the PC and seeing if that allows me to run both the shield and PC on wireless and still allow for game streaming. Has anyone any experience of that working?

Another option would be to upgrade to an AV1200 powerline kit, but they're reasonably pricey right now and might not even work much better if the house wiring isn't great. If anyone has any other suggestions that I haven't thought of that would be great!

Metric Tensor

If you own the house maybe find a clever place to hide a CAT 6 wire from the router to your TV location - back of cupboards, hotpress, etc.?

Might not be possible but if it is it should solve all your problems in one go. The wire would be about 1 euro a metre so say 20 quid and a router for the end of it could be as low as 20 but probably 40 ish - so 70ish total if you need a few patch cables.

Plus hours of sweating, bleeding and cursing at the man who built the house of course!!!

ED E

You do NOT want the shield on wifi (or the PC its fed by). Speed isnt everything, for gaming latency is much more important.

The HPs are likely blocking bcast traffic (they often do) as a performance optimization but that can feck with discovery protocols such as those used by Shield/Steam IHS.


Trying AV1000/1200 HPs could bring you up over 100Mb depending on home wiring though ideally you'd run Cat5e+.

brainiac

Appreciate the responses guys! For the moment, direct wiring from the modem is unlikely. The room in question is at awkward angles to the main room and it would cause a lot of fuss that others wouldn't want.

Right now there's cat 5e's coming into both the PC and the Shield from the powerline so it's surprising they are only getting about 50-60Mbps, but the AV500 is only rated for up to 100Mbps so I suppose that's not a bad ratio.

Also, to clarify on the game streaming, I would likely not be playing multiplayer games streamed over to the TV, at least not very often. So as long as the direct connection is good to avoid stutter (current connection mostly manages that since the powerline is essentially acting as a second router and creating a LAN for the Shield and PC), i'm happy. Just don't want to sacrifice 60-80% of the speed by wiring when I could be getting the full 150-160Mb on 5GHz wireless.

Anyway, I'll look into wiring options, but otherwise I might try out either an AV1200 or a cheap PCI 802.11a on the PC and just hook the ethernet's up whenever I'm game streaming just.

ED E

brainiac wrote: »

but the AV500 is only rated for up to 100Mbps so I suppose that's not a bad ratio.

The problem with homeplugs is the farcical numbers. AV500 often only do 40Mb, my AV1000s do 140Mb (1G ports). The technology is a bit of a hack so can never really live up to claims.

brainiac

ED E wrote: »

The problem with homeplugs is the farcical numbers. AV500 often only do 40Mb, my AV1000s do 140Mb (1G ports). The technology is a bit of a hack so can never really live up to claims.

Yeah, I'm aware of that! I figure the gigabit port will make some measure of difference over the 100mbps though. If I get 140 out of AV1000/1200, I won't be wanting for much more.