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Ravi
Asked: 2011-02-03 16:47:20 +0800 CST

ping round trip time on WiFi

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I have two Windows 7 machines on the same wireless LAN. When I try pinging from one machine to the other, the round trip times range from 1ms to 300ms, with lots of variation in between. Is it normal to see such high latencies and jitter?

I tried multiple brand routers as well as different WiFi channels, and the results are the same. If I switch the machines to wired, the problem goes away and it's always in the 1ms range.

networking wifi local-area-network

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Yes. This is normal. Wifi is a shared media network and you'll get lots of jitter when multiple clients want to talk at the same time and buffering occurs.

    Things to try to reduce jitter:

    • change the wifi channel to the three non overlapping channels (1,6 or 11) These are generally better bets - use a wifi scanner to check your environment

    • look for potential sources of interference and turn them off or move them (microwaves, cordless phones, bluetooth, baby monitors)

    • remove other wifi devices from the same network (iphones, tivos, etc) - less devices means less radio interference

    • If you access point supports it: connect one host using a 5ghz channel and the other using a 2.4Ghz channel.

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