The enemy is right there in the crosshairs, we are sure we pulled the trigger at the right time but that slowdown in connection made us escape. And, as if that weren’t enough, in an asset we find ourselves lying dead on the ground. This, which looks like the digital version of Piero’s War by Fabrizio de Andre ‘, is a common experience of those who play online. And again: we intervened with refined timing on the player shot at goal, but a connection delay makes us miss the intervention and it is a penalty kick. The good news is that problems with an unsuitable connection for online play can be remedied.
First of all, it is necessary to know that it is the consumer online activity where the quality of our connection is put to the most severe test. On the online game, where we compete with others in real time, there is no buffering to save us from network hiccups (a bit like high-speed online trading). Unlike other demanding activities, such as live streaming football, online gaming also needs a good upload (not just download). There is continuous data exchange between us and the network, and bidirectional.
Note that a temporary problem may be the server’s fault (we find this out at https://gameserverping.com), but if we’re only penalized it’s our connection’s fault. Let’s see the steps to follow to have an optimal connection.
A good connection
The raw material is internet access suitable for online gaming. Quite fast and with low latency (parameter that indicates the “reactivity” of the connection). Access must also be stable, reliable. “There is nothing better than FTTH, optical fiber in homes, for online gaming, for its very low latency times and connection stability,” says Stefano Paggi, of Open Fiber. Too bad that only about 30% of Italians are covered. Alternatively there is the fiber to the cabinet (Vdsl2 up to 200 Mbps), with which you lose a few milliseconds, if all goes well; unfortunately there are also cases of faulty or too long copper pairs (in old houses or in the countryside) where the loss of reactivity is much more incisive; and data download / upload speed can also be affected. “Underneath again, for latency, is the old-school fixed wireless access. But the new one, based on 5G standards, has a very valid latency for gaming », says Paggi. There are also operators who say they have an optimized connection for online gaming; it also happened at the time of ADSL. For example, Ehiweb, Briantel, Fibracity do it on fiber.
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A good home network.
Then you have to do your homework well. Many recommend changing the DNS on the access device and using Google’s. Paggi also recommends, for the most demanding gamers, the ethernet cable connected from the TV or PC to the router. There are also tens of meters and we can make it pass high up on the walls, but if we want to use Wi-Fi, at least make sure we have a good signal at the point where we play. Our previous guides on Wi-Fi are useful for this purpose; in summary, we must equip ourselves with a good medium-high-end router (above 200 euros), with mesh technology and probably also with repeaters (always mesh); better triband. Let’s do a speedtest where we want to play in Wi-Fi compared with a speedtest on the PC connected via ethernet to the router. If we substantially lose speed and latency, Wi-Fi is optimizable. The router should be of good quality even if we use ethernet. If it has little CPU and memory – as in cheap models – it introduces too much latency. A suitable router also has good software (a component which can also introduce latency); also able to prioritize traffic for specific uses: gaming in our case. “It is good, for online gaming, to take a router that allows you to customize the priority with which it manages the requests of the connected devices or alternatively the priority for certain types of traffic”. For example, I favor the PS5 connected to the router or the ports and protocols necessary for the functioning of the gaming clouds, disadvantaging other types of traffic, for example peer-to-peer, says Diego D’Olimpio, of the operator specialized in Unidata fiber. There are also routers optimized for gaming and branded like this, from Asus, Netgear, Linksys, Tp-Link, Zyxel. The look is also meant to appeal to the typical hardcore gamer. Also worth mentioning is the Fritz! Box 7590 which, despite its sober appearance and the absence of a “for gamer” branding, has the same suitable technical characteristics.