Thread by @Nick_Craver

I've seen the question "what is the best gaming WiFi" several times this week.

The answer is "cat5e or higher".

Yes that's a smartass answer, but seriously: if you can at all possible: cable!

WiFi is, in most homes, a time-share based model and the weakest/lowest device still dictates some of the overall behavior. It's not the bandwidth, it's the stalls when it's other people's turn.

I've covered this before, but it's worth saying again: we represent units in seconds because that's how *humans* can reasonably compare them. Computers operate in nanoseconds. You need to break down what's inside a second, then the lower time intervals matter for your purpose.

For example, do you say "I have a 1s ping"? Well I hope not, because that's horrible. You say "I have a 20ms ping", or 50ms, the point is that's 1/20th of a second. We need to look at something more finite than a second to do anything meaningful.

Okay now, your WiFi will be switching out those time slots for traffic, usually multiple times per second. Let's talk bandwidth, say we have 100ms slices:
0-100ms: 500mbps
101-200ms: 0 mbps
201-400ms: 500mbps
401-500ms: 0 mbps
...repeat...
That's 250mbps, not too shabby!

...but if say you clicked to perform a game action in that 2nd 101-200ms interval when it wasn't your turn to send, it might be up to 100ms before it sends (we're just using 100ms as an example here - it'll vary).

So overall: bandwidth seems fine, but latency varies on WiFi.

And in general: I recommend giving a bit of thought on what "per second" metrics really mean. I did a thread a while back on that here, I hope it's useful:

https://twitter.com/Nick_Craver/status/1038747663636877312