Lan Gaming and wireless networking

[fudgam]

I was just wondering if a wireless lan party would actually work. Would ping times be really high? I was just thinking how cool it would be to have no wires.

[primesuspect]

It would probably be pretty bad, yes.

If it was a high quality AP (Cisco, Orinoco) and maybe under 20 people, it might be alright...

[KingFish]

I would definitely take the wires for a lan party. I would hate to imagine the potential for interference at a wireless event.

KingFish

[a2jfreak]

"Ok, which idiot turned on the microwave to cook some popcorn?!"

[KingFish]

/me points to Orville Redenbaucher

[FormFactor]

When you get a 802.11G AP which is supposedly 54MBPS, AFAIK that 54MBPS is shared between all the computers on it. The more you have the slower it will get. Anyone please correct me if I am wrong here.

On top of that, LAN partys usually require a lot of files to be transferred around the LAN (like huge patches, etc). 2 or 3 simutaniously would bring that bandwidth to a crawl.

-4m

[qparadox]

If there's only a few people and you're only gaming your ping will be fine. I've bridged 20 computers at a lan center to a nearby AP before and had not great pings, but acceptable once considering the bridged connection was ADSL connected to a Linksys AP (remember this is only 1 wireless link however so interference wasn't important). With less than 10-15 people and NO file transferring I think it'll work fine, with more than that you'll have super bad pings. Oh and no matter how few people are on the AP expect pings higher than wired but still in the 20-30 ms range (this is based on my own experience yours may vary).

So in summary, it'll work on small scale but will scale up very poorly unless you invest in an ub3r good infrastructure and even then it'll only scale barely acceptably. You're gonna need wires for power anyways, you might as well keep the wires for the network. wireless might work for bridging two seperate lans (since no interference this way) but remember the *real* throughput of 802.11G is only ~22 Mbps.

[fudgam]

Thanks for all the replies