Living in a gaming house looking for a better network setup.

[Coldbolt]

Hello!

 

I am currently living in a gaming house where the network seems to be very fragile. I live in Northern Ireland where my ISP is British Telecom. I live in an area where Fiber Optic has been available for a while now so I have been using it for years. I haven't had any issues with it until I started living with many people. I'll explain.

 

We currently have a BT Home Hub 5. However as this is a big property, we have had to use extenders for the property. Currently there are 7 active extenders connecting to the one ethernet port so I'm having the guess that's not a good idea however I'm not to sure what else I could do bar connect everyone via cables but still issues would still arise. 

 

So the question. If I connected everyone using all 4 available ethernet ports instead of connecting everyone to one ethernet port via using one extender to the wall and then for everyone to connect to that extender, would this be a better idea?

 

I ask this because I just need to know what setup I should be using and finding justification in paying out for a router which I hope will see difference to what I'm using right now. 

 

Kind Regards,

Coldbolt.

[Netduma Crossy]

Welcome to the forum Coldbolt

 

I don't think it would be a problem having all the plugs going to one ethernet port. As long as the cables are good quality it shouldn't be an issue.

 

Are you currently experiencing any problems with the way the extender are set up?

[Zennon]

If by any chance you have lag caused by other members of the house streaming or downloading while you game then the Netduma stop's that from happening with the congestion control.

[Dillinger]

I'll admit that I am no Network Engineer or expert, but there are a few laws of wiring I have picked up over the years that make me question this action.

 

1) Home run is always best.  Splitting any signal weakens the original signal.  This causes the overall "strength" of the signal to be lower than optimized at the device.  This is why you never daisy chain communications and data lines like they do with electrical lines in homes.  It can cause major problems and it only costs a little bit more to do it right and home run everything to the driving device.

 

2) Adding amplifiers, or extenders, or even an EDFA to a fiber line, doesn't give you the same QUALITY of signal strength.  An amplified or boosted signal also has an electronic noise floor that is amplified.  If you amplify that noise floor enough, it starts to play havoc with the intended purpose of the line in question.  

 

3) Splitting a signal is a short cut.  It saves time, it can save money, but even if you do it right out of the source, the overall performance is going to be less than the same distance, connected correctly.

 

I suspect a centrally located hub, with home run cables to the terminals in question, would offer the best overall performance from the home infrastructure would go.  The Congestion Control will allow you to allocate bandwidth for streaming and downloads, while the gaming should be left mostly unaffected.

 

Again - Not a Network tech, but those rules have worked on just about everything else I have built for work and for home.

 

More information coming, I am sure of it.  Good luck.

[Coldbolt]

Hello!

 

After thinking about a new setup, Dillinger makes a good point. I could have easily setup a switch upstairs and set up a wired network that way instead of thinking I needed one big wire to go downstairs. This would have been a direct fix. However this is something I will probably do in the future.

 

The router which comes with BT has a modem inside so would I need to connect from my BT router to the Netduma router to then setup a switch for upstairs and then just setup each computer downstairs to another switch for downstairs.

 

And yes, people will be downloading and streaming a good bit so this is where the router comes in. Also I need to get the lowest ping I can as the players are semi professional players looking to go into professional players next month. The lowest ping is needed however BT has done a good job in routing us to the EU League servers from 42 ping to 35 ping. Still I'd love to get this lowered if possible but I understand the actually space between both places, my house and the servers does play to the ping. It's just getting the best routes possible and for the internal network to not be a problem.

 

Thanks for all the help! Great community such like the overclocking ones.

[Zennon]

                                                   Cat 6 cable to - Switch for up stairs

Wall > Bt HomeHub > Netduma /

                                                    \

                                                     Switch for down stairs

 

Would be how I would do it.

 

On the subject of ping it is all at the mercy of your isp, the only thing you can do is make sure your wiring from your master socket to the Hub is optimal (I use twisted pair adsl cable to shield from noise/EMI)

This results in less errors which means the DLM in the cabinet does not put me on a Interleaved path which adds latency to the line because of static error correction.

There is an on the fly error correction called G.inp this keeps you on fastpath keeping your pings low while correcting errors only when they happen resulting in low latency.

 

Not all cabinets have been enabled and not all routers have been firmware upgraded to use this feature.

I have a Hauwei modem that was flashed with an older FW which did not support G.inp and because it was enabled at the cab it made my latency even higher than a normal interleaved path. 42ms

 

I then flashed to a supported FW and now my pings are 15ms. This proves that if you cab is G.inp enabled but you do not have the supporting FW then your pings will suffer as it makes the depth of the interleaving stronger another BT mess up.