Poor gaming experience - but struggling to actually ‘fix’ it

So I’ve been gaming on WiFi for many years (obviously not ideal, but wasn’t causing too many problems until recently)

Due to my physical disability, I cannot run an Ethernet cable to the desired location (I also have no family/friends who can do DIY) + Powerline is probably unsuitable (age of wiring. different circuits etc) plus I’ve heard it’s not much better (speeds and that - I have a 500mbps connection)

So I started trying to contact electricians/AV people many of whom have failed to respond and those that are responding are giving me ridiculous prices (one was £480+VAT, which is absolutely ridiculous for one cable, probably 2 hours of work). I’ve also tried posting on my local FB groups with no real success. I’ve also heard that the well known websites (CheckaTrade, MyBuilder etc) are rubbish and haven’t had much success with responses from tradespeople from them either.

Route is from the living room at the back of the house to a gaming PC in the upstairs bedroom directly above, so not particularly complex

I’m in SW London if that helps anyone to suggest anybody - but would appreciate some advice in general.

Occasionally I am able to play with an experience that is somewhat acceptable, but most of time it’s unusable due to the variation in latency - switched from VM (which I know is poor for latency) to EE FTTP which has helped slightly, but not very much

Testing on the Xbox Series X that is downstairs and can be connected via Ethernet at any time of day is always fine, so I think it’s 100% the WiFi.

Sorry for the long post but really needed to vent.

Definitely worth a go- thanks! (where can I get an incredibly long one)

Power line ethernet adapter?

Alot of houses have COAX Aerial cables already installed
Is there a Coax Cable already in place close to the router and your gaming setup?

In my house i have aerial cables already in place and have utilised MoCa
I get my full fibre connection over the MoCa mesh network.

Even if its closer to your gaming setup you could then use a wired mesh node close to your gaming rig to much improve your wifi connection

In My House i have
ONT >> Router >> MOCA Master -- MoCa Slave 1 >> Gaming PC
?-- MoCa Slave 2 >> MESH Node

The MoCa network only has one master and can have many Slaves - As i have coax in all my rooms i can just keep adding Slaves in each room if i wanted.

If you want to do more than Point to Point you do need to consider what is required - I use the same cabling for TV Aerial - So i have a filter to split the TV from the MoCa frequencies


ETA - https://www.gocoax.com/ma2500d

Thanks for your reply (and sorry for the delay, I was stopped from replying by the system)

The PC in question has an ASUS B550 motherboard with WiFi 6 (says the card is a MediaTek MT7921, in case that’s of note, so don’t think that’s the problem.

Switched from VM to EE - but the signal on both routers (VM Hub5 and EE SmartHub Plus -tbh both default routers that I agree would need replacing, but I have no idea about routers) has always been poor, there are no obstructions.

Using my iPhone’s Airport Utility app to test the signal levels upstairs. I’m getting around 70 dBm on Channels 64 and 11.

So in the room the PC is, I’m getting around 400mbps (20% loss) on the Speedtest app. Although the speeds are highly variable (did a test by the router and got 112mbps)

Signal level downstairs is around 30-40dBm

So I did consider getting a powerline but there's not enough plug sockets (my house has a severe lack of them) - I presume this would be a problem with a mesh as well

I had an Ethernet cable ran to the computer today (for a reasonable price - not anywhere near £480!) and the quality of the connection has definitely improved there (now getting a good experience in games and consistently 500mbps)

Would Wireless Access Points be worth considering - other WiFi devices anywhere but the living room are struggling. I've also heard of ASUS's AIMesh where two ASUS routers can act as a mesh (is this worth considering, particularly as I need more than one Ethernet port on the main router?)

Your computer is most likely getting a full speed 1gigabit link to the router.

Wifi is a number of channels at 2.4 or 5ghz. 2.4 travels further but is slower.

All the devices you have on wifi have to exist together, only one can speak at a time. So if you are gaming and someone is watching netflix both on the same wireless network channel they share the bandwidth.

You have things like microwaves and cordless phones for example that can affect the signal.

However, not only are your devices competing for the bandwidth, so is everyone else's.

If you live in a busy area, if you have lots of neighbours using WIFI devices, you have more and more devices to share the bandwidth with.

I just set my phone to scan and it picked up about 10 devices that were from cars driving past my house, all using similar channels, these could easily cause intermittent performance as they go past but be very hard to trace.

As a rule, if it can be wired it will be wired, I use wifi where wiring is not possible, eg phone tablet etc.