Why you won’t be able to play online well if you connect to a WiFi repeater

Playing online by connecting to a WiFi repeater is an error

The first thing you should know if you want To play online with guarantees, is that It is never recommended to use WiFi connectivity to connect to the Internet, but you should connect by cable whenever possible. Reasons to use cable instead of Wi-Fi connection are as follows:

• If you connect via WiFi to the band of 2.4GHz will have a lot of interferencewhich translates into high latency and very high latency peaks (jitter), making it almost impossible for you to play correctly.
• If you connect via Wi-Fi on the 5GHz band, you may also experience interference from neighboring networks, although less than the 2.4GHz band. In this case, the problem could be that we have less coverageso you may not get a good link.
• WiFi will always have a higher latency than connecting via cable.
• The latency variation (jitter) is clearly higher than the cable, which is 0ms almost always.

Therefore, the user experience is clearly worse if you connect via WiFi than if you use the cable to play online. Is user experience radically worsens if you decide to use a repeater WiFi to extend the wireless signal, and you connect to it believing that the network will work better for you, this is a mistake. Now you can have greater coverage, provided by the repeater, but it does not mean that you will have a higher speed or that the latency will decrease, on the contrary. Also, you could have WiFi outages if you put the repeater too far from the router.

When we connect a WiFi repeater to the main router, we must take into account that the bandwidth that we will obtain in the clients to connect to the repeater, it will be about half than if we connect directly to the wireless router. This is due to the very nature of the WiFi wireless network, where each “repeater” provides half of the available bandwidth on the link. In addition to having less bandwidth, playing online is worse because of this:

• The latency of the connection will be even higherbecause the packets must first go to the WiFi repeater, and then to the router, it does not go directly to the router, which adds extra latency due to the nature of WiFi.
• The jitter in the connection will be clearly higherespecially if we have other wireless devices connected to the main router or repeater.

As you can see, it is a complete mistake to use a WiFi repeater for online games, believing that the connection will work better for you.

If you use a old router as wifi repeateryou would also be in the same scenario.

What can I do to improve it and play well?

If you have to use a WiFi repeater to have wireless coverage throughout your home, what you could do to improve it is the following:

• If he repeater is simultaneous triple band, you can connect to a dedicated 5GHz band with the router. In this way, you will have slightly less latency and less jitter. It would be ideal for the router to also be a simultaneous triple band, with the aim of dedicating a 5GHz band to the interconnection of the equipment.
• If you can connect via cable to repeateryou will save a lot of latency and jitter because it will be as if you were connected by WiFi to the main router.

Of course, one option that you should consider would be to buy some Powerline PLC devices. These types of devices allow us to connect to the local network and the Internet through the electrical network. Generally, if we use PLC Powerline, we will have less latency in the connection and less jitter, however, everything will depend on the state of your electrical network at home and also if you use electrical appliances that require a lot of energy in a short time, such as the oven or the ceramic hob. . By using these devices we will have a higher latency and jitter while that consumption lasts.