trying to understand this

[bosflo 53]

I just tested my download speed because we all know how important our wifi speed is going to be. I have 52 dl speed on my laptop and 270 dl speed on my phone. They both us the same network so how are they so different? If the game was played on the phone I would be all set but of course it will need to be played on the slow laptop. Can anyone help me understand what this all means.

[decker89 110]

Your laptop may be connected on a 2.4ghz channel to your wireless access point. Your phone may be connected on a 5ghz channel.  5ghz channel provide faster connection to your device as long as you have a strong signal.

Check to see if your laptop supports 5ghz wifi.

[kowen 64]

We will assume you don't have a 5G phone either?

[OSJJ1985 134]

I find it hard to believe 50 mbit DL isn't more than enough. But as mentioned already it's more about stability than speed, especially when it comes to streaming. I just ordered a new connection to use the hard line mainly for stability reasons. 

[Noooch 1,084]

I had around 120 Mbps which was more than enough. One day I decided to plug the ethernet cable and my speed went up to 700/800 Mbps instantly.

 

Edited October 14, 2019 by Noooch

[Dominique_K 10,133]

1 hour ago, Noooch said:

I had around 120 Mbps which was more than enough. One day I decided to plug the ethernet cable and my speed went up to 700/800 Mbps instantly.

 

Sigh.

I should try. I may go from a nominal 4.5 Mbps to a dizzying  7.4, who knows 😂? 

[vortex681 806]

15 hours ago, bosflo said:

I have 52 dl speed on my laptop and 270 dl speed on my phone.

How are you testing the speed? In the end it's all down to what deal you have with your ISP. If you had a 100Mbps plan (I wish!), then that's the maximum you're ever going to get on the best day. Connecting through wifi is only likely to reduce that - it's just not possible to increase it.

 

Edited October 14, 2019 by vortex681

[Noooch 1,084]

50 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

How are you testing the speed?

https://www.speedtest.net/fr

[jpc55 185]

6 hours ago, domkle said:

Sigh.

I should try. I may go from a nominal 4.5 Mbps to a dizzying  7.4, who knows 😂? 

Nothing ventured, nothing gained!

[MattNischan 3,778]

19 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

I would NOT recommend WiFi for the new MSFS or anything that is latency critical, hard wire Cat6e cable to ISP modem or switch if you want the best speed and stability.

Based on what information? I think it's way too early to say that WiFi would not be recommended.

As an IT professional (first a sysadmin for 10 years, now a programmer for 6), we use WiFi in all sorts of applications professionally that have reasonable bandwidth requirements and latency is generally not a problem (including live streaming applications). Within a normal sized home, WiFi is going to add at most 10-15ms latency, and given the most likely architecture employed by the engine (i.e. spitballing based on what I know about both systems and game engine programming), I highly, highly doubt that having the lowest possible pings is going to be any concern whatsoever. Similarly, I keep hearing about people being nervous about bandwidth requirements.

Yes, they have 2PB of data at their disposal. That's _their side_ data; I guarantee not client side. And keep in mind the earth is 192M mi^2. But mostly, the thing to keep in mind is that this is still just a game that has to run on commodity hardware. Mesh data is super tiny and very, very compressible (and by this I mean all in game vertex data). Texture data has to fit in VRAM, and loading in and out of VRAM constantly is extremely expensive. Which means even photogrammetry based buildings can't be massive 4K x 4K textures per building, you'd never get it all to fit. So, realistically, the onscreen data for your visible area is not going to be that massive.

I would be highly, highly surprised if the max needed bandwidth was any more than 20-25Mbits in the worst case (flying low and really fast), and I think latency will be meaningless unless it is high enough that it impacts your actual bandwidth. Aircraft simply don't change position or vector enough at scale to affect any caching mechanism that they would have in place to grab anticipated data. And, don't forget, this data has to still fit on your disk without eating it for breakfast (either in space by taking up all the space on disk unexpectedly, or with huge amounts of write cycles for SSDs), and additionally the most recent areas that you've been will already be on disk, so your connection is not a concern there.

All this says to me that bandwidth requirements will be very sane (think Netflix) and that latency will not be a big deal.

-Matt N

[Ezra 29]

26 minutes ago, MattNischan said:

Based on what information? I think it's way too early to say that WiFi would not be recommended.

As an IT professional (first a sysadmin for 10 years, now a programmer for 6), we use WiFi in all sorts of applications professionally that have reasonable bandwidth requirements and latency is generally not a problem (including live streaming applications). Within a normal sized home, WiFi is going to add at most 10-15ms latency, and given the most likely architecture employed by the engine (i.e. spitballing based on what I know about both systems and game engine programming), I highly, highly doubt that having the lowest possible pings is going to be any concern whatsoever. Similarly, I keep hearing about people being nervous about bandwidth requirements.

Yes, they have 2PB of data at their disposal. That's _their side_ data; I guarantee not client side. And keep in mind the earth is 192M mi^2. But mostly, the thing to keep in mind is that this is still just a game that has to run on commodity hardware. Mesh data is super tiny and very, very compressible (and by this I mean all in game vertex data). Texture data has to fit in VRAM, and loading in and out of VRAM constantly is extremely expensive. Which means even photogrammetry based buildings can't be massive 4K x 4K textures per building, you'd never get it all to fit. So, realistically, the onscreen data for your visible area is not going to be that massive.

I would be highly, highly surprised if the max needed bandwidth was any more than 20-25Mbits in the worst case (flying low and really fast), and I think latency will be meaningless unless it is high enough that it impacts your actual bandwidth. Aircraft simply don't change position or vector enough at scale to affect any caching mechanism that they would have in place to grab anticipated data. And, don't forget, this data has to still fit on your disk without eating it for breakfast (either in space by taking up all the space on disk unexpectedly, or with huge amounts of write cycles for SSDs), and additionally the most recent areas that you've been will already be on disk, so your connection is not a concern there.

All this says to me that bandwidth requirements will be very sane (think Netflix) and that latency will not be a big deal.

-Matt N

It`s always nice to see correction of opinion based on facts. Thank You Sir.

[simbol 5,811]

Latency under TCP/IP protocols are well known to cause bandwidth losses.

It is the biggest problem we always face over long distances communications, specially when we have to make data transfers across the world.

Each router will add a hop to the destination, which in turn adds delays, these delays inevitable cause any speed to retrieve the data to degrade despite of how much internet speed you might have. So for example if you are in Australia with a 100mbps internet connection and you wish to download a file from Hawaii or UK, which will have a considerable amount of latency (200ms to 300 ms) your real speed to get the file is about 20mbps.

That without considering international traffic contention and congestion on both sides of the communication.

This is the reason why Google, Amazon and Microsoft cloud services installs servers all around the world, so you connect to the closest server near you (Geo Location), reducing the TCP/IP delay as much as possible.

You can calculate accurately your real connection speed with formulas given your connection delay in milliseconds.

Where I am going with these? Wired connections have less than 1ms delay over TCP/IP before reaching the external world, while some WiFi connections will vary, having sometimes from 10ms to 20ms before reaching the external world. After reaching the external world more delay will added to the TCP/IP stack, making your real speed to send or receive data slower than wired media.

Before disputing the info, Google TCP/IP delay bandwidth issues.

And before anybody tells me I have no idea what I am talking about, I have been working in networking since I am 17years old, now 43 and I work full time as Corporate Network and Security Administrator for an international firm managing 12+ Datacenters around the world providing services to customers 24/7/365 ensuring that there is never any downtime and If you want my CV I am happy to provide it via PM.

Rob advise regarding WiFi is actually accurate. Wired is better than WiFi, if you want to use WiFi for streaming video games you can, but it will never be as fast as wired.

Regards,

Simbol 

[n4gix 4,947]

7 minutes ago, simbol said:

Rob advise regarding WiFi is actually accurate. Wired is better than WiFi, if you want to use WiFi for streaming video games you can, but it will never be as fast as wired.

This are the results from my main desktop development computer plugged into my D-Link Router via CAT6 cable:

I don't have a screenshot of my main FS test computer, but the results are less stellar:

Ping = 24 ms  Download = 75.12 Mbps  Upload = 4.92 Mbps

Even though it too is connected via CAT6 cable, My auxiliary router in my Library room is limited to 100 Mbps. I'll need to replace it with a higher spec router to regain performance.

[MattNischan 3,778]

1 hour ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Real world experience from about year 2000 when I first starting using WiFi some 19 years ago ... you're certainly the first person I've encountered in the IT field that feels Wifi is a better option than a cable connection.

Are you say cabling is more prone to interference than WiFi?  Please provide some technical basis for this conjecture?\

Wow, not at all, and I don't get the vitriol here. I was simply stating, based on my technical expertise in the field in multiple portions of it (both having deployed WiFi in the enterprise and having programmed both distributed systems and games), that I don't believe that the small amount of extra latency will be a problem for this type of application, and that I very seriously doubt much bandwidth will be needed. I would be extremely surprised to find otherwise.

Certainly no one here is claiming that WiFi is a better PHY than wired. I'm just saying that you recommended avoiding WiFi for MSFS, in big bold letters, when really I doubt that kind of hyperbole is warranted for this type of scenario. This is a game; unless the server you connect to is in your house, hardly anyone ever gets single digit pings playing games online, and it would be absolute netcode suicide to build in so little leeway that 10-15ms is going to trash the scenery streaming. And let's be honest here; I have never measured a difference that large in WiFi vs wired (normally I see diffs of about 1-3ms extra) even in super crowded enterprise scenarios with lots of metal walls between everything.

1 hour ago, simbol said:

 

Rob advise regarding WiFi is actually accurate. Wired is better than WiFi, if you want to use WiFi for streaming video games you can, but it will never be as fast as wired.

 

This is not a streaming video game platform like Stadia, Playstation Now, or OnLive (RIP) where you need dedicated low latency in order to provide accurate per-frame rendering and control inputs because the game is rendered and processed server side. Scenery data will be streamed to the client as the client enters scenery zones; the game is rendered locally. There's no other way to do it, and that much is super clear because of the fact that you can pre-download and cache scenery areas. Thus, the little extra latency of WiFi is not going to be a problem. Even the slight RTT hit is not going to cut your bandwidth down 80-90%.

I stand by my analysis. If you can stream Netflix, you'll be fine here. When the game comes out, if I'm wrong about that, I'll gladly be the first to eat my words.

[irrics 1,517]

This seems like a generic tech help topic and not really something that belongs in the MSFS area specifically