Would a wifi extender help reduce game lag?

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killerkev

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Jun 20, 2015
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Hi tom's Hardware,

I have a quick question. So I have a desktop in my upstairs room with a TP-LINK TL-WDN4800 connected to it. My router linksys e2500 is located downstairs. I have naturally a solid 3 bars on my wifi access. I can only game without lagging if no one else is streaming content i,e, youtube etc.

So would a wifi extender such as a Linksys - N600 Dual-Band Wi-Fi Range Extender help me out at all If it matters our download speed is 50 mbps and upload speed 10 mbps. And I get naturally 25-30 mbps down and 10 mbps up in my room and having a ethernet cable to my room is not entirely possible..

Any input would be appreciated!
 
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It will likely make it worse. A wireless repeater will intentionally transmit a duplicate signal into the same radio frequency. This causes interference with the main signal and causes data retransmissions. In general you get about 1/2 the speed due to the duplication of data and the error recovery transmissions caused by data overlaps.

Repeater trade signal strength for signal quality. A game need very dependable data delivery rates. It does not use a lot but it does not tolerate any loss or delays.

Your problems may overloading of your internet connection and not the wireless, you would have to test with a wired connection.

You might want to look into powerline network devices if you find it is a wireless issues and not a...
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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It will likely make it worse. A wireless repeater will intentionally transmit a duplicate signal into the same radio frequency. This causes interference with the main signal and causes data retransmissions. In general you get about 1/2 the speed due to the duplication of data and the error recovery transmissions caused by data overlaps.

Repeater trade signal strength for signal quality. A game need very dependable data delivery rates. It does not use a lot but it does not tolerate any loss or delays.

Your problems may overloading of your internet connection and not the wireless, you would have to test with a wired connection.

You might want to look into powerline network devices if you find it is a wireless issues and not a over use of the internet condition.
 
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killerkev

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Jun 20, 2015
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Would getting a better router be a possible solution besides powerline adapter?
 
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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It depends what you mean by better. If you look the current router you have up in the fcc database it shows it puts out like 27db on the test results. This is close to the maximum allowed of 30db. Pretty much this transmit power is what is represented by the number of bars. You would have to do massive digging to find one that had like 29db. The vast majority of router are in this upper range.

I suspect especially if the other users are also wireless you problem is interference. Games are extremely susceptible to variations in the packet delivery rate and interference in the wireless causes retransmissions which causes extreme variations in the packet delivery rate.

This is the key reason it is not recommended to play games on wireless.
 
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