Wi-Fi or cable: what a wire gives a game

What Wi-Fi does to packets

The radio air is a shared medium. Your laptop, phone, TV and the neighbors' routers share the same frequencies and take turns talking. When the air is busy, a packet waits; when interference damages a frame, the router sends it again. For a file download that goes unnoticed; for a game it is a ping spike or a lost packet.

A cable is a dedicated medium: nobody talks on it except your PC and the router. That is why latency over a wire is steady, and loss on a healthy network is rare. A cable may barely change the average ping, but jitter and loss — exactly what you feel as stutter — usually go away.

Interference

A microwave oven, wireless headphones and cameras, the neighbors' networks on the same channel. The more of them there are, the more often frames get damaged and resent.

Walls and distance

Every wall weakens the signal, concrete and mirrors especially. A weak signal means a slower transfer rate and more retries.

A busy channel

A TV streaming a show and a phone downloading an update share the air with the game. Game packets wait their turn, and ping rises in waves.

Power saving

A laptop's adapter may doze off between packets to save battery. For email that does not matter; for a game it is extra milliseconds to wake up at the worst possible moment.

How to check whether Wi-Fi is to blame

1. Turn on the ping and loss display in the game and play a match over Wi-Fi. Write down the spikes and the loss, not the average ping.
2. Connect your PC to the same router with a cable and play another match on the same server.
3. Compare the loss and the stutter. If they disappeared over the cable, you have found the cause.
4. If it is the same over the cable, Wi-Fi is not at fault: look at background downloads, your ISP's route and the distance to the server.

Where to turn on the ping and loss display: Counter-Strike 2 · PUBG: Battlegrounds · Apex Legends · Fortnite · Dota 2

If you cannot run a cable

• The 5 GHz band in the same room as the router: it is less crowded by neighbors but passes through walls worse, so the router and the PC need to be close.
• A free channel: in the router's settings pick a channel with fewer neighboring networks, or leave automatic selection and reboot the router.
• Clear the air: for the length of the match, let the phones and the TV skip updates and video.
• Turn off power saving on the Wi-Fi adapter: in Windows Device Manager the adapter has a power management tab.
• An adapter with an external antenna, or a USB extension to move the adapter out from behind the PC case, where the metal shields it.
• A wired alternative without renovation: a flat cable along the baseboard, or powerline adapters — steadier than the air, though short of a direct wire.

What the accelerator does here

Nothing — and it is important to say so honestly. Wi-Fi damages packets before they leave your apartment, while an accelerator works on the path from your ISP to the game server. SLARP optimizes ping and jitter on that outer leg, but it cannot see the interference between the router and the PC. So first the cable, then everything else: that way the accelerator's result is visible without the noise.