Topic: Connection Advice Requested

[Mazeppa]

Before Thanksgiving, I never had connection issues.  I was running (Since 1999) off a cable modem and a hub, and bought 2 extra IP's to run three computers.  Me and my son, Malacoda, never had connection issues, and could run 3 v 3 's on Gamespy or the Dynaverse.

I went to a router and my gaming rig went wireless around thanksgiving.  My signal strength was low, but I could do everything I wanted to do.

Then I came back for the Forge and KCW.  For the Forge, I had no worries.  But for KCW, I began to have connection issues with more than one person.  I would drop. 

Today, I moved the cable modem into this room (after much travail trying ouher solutions) and directly connected off the router with the other computer going wireless.  Then this evening I was in a 3V2, and all looked good, until lots of things started happening (I had someone tractored, dropped a scatterpack, lots of missiles in the air), and THEN I dropped. 

I concluded that the router was causing an additional level of complexity for my connection, and hooked up the old hub, and hooked up my computer to the hub, and the router to the hub, for the other computer to communicate. 

So my connection is cable modem-->hub-->my gaming rig.  The only thing that is new now is that the other, non-gaming  computer is hooked up to the Internet like this: cable modem-->hub-->router-->wireless card. 

As I see it, from my gaming rig point of view, the connection is now like it was, with two things hooked up to the hub.  The router is, as far as I can see it, out of the equation as far as my connection is concerned.  I will now try and connect and see if there are issues. 

If you can see a flaw in my thinking, please let me know.  I want to play KCW, but will not play if I put multiplayer at risk for others. 

Hopefully,

[Mazeppa]

So i presume I'm doing it right.

[Bonk]

Sounds reasonable, if not excessively complicated. I suspect you may have been missing something in the router config, however if your signal strength is weak, then the wireless setup could easily result in drops, so you have probably done the right thing. Myself, I don't trust wireless at all, in fact, I prefer the superior coax signal conductor over the newer UTP, unfortunately fast ethernet never made it onto coax as people cannot handle the topology of it as easily as UTP cabling, this logic extends to wireless, it seems the more convenient it is the lower the quality and reliability; a disturbing trend in technology. 

edit: come to think of it, a locking coax "T" with only one free BNC connector might have saved it... hmmm I wonder if I could revive coax... nah, fibre will be the way of it all soon as there are limits on how much copper we can use. But inevitably people will start bending fibre past its permissible radius and start tying it in knots and such and then wonder why it does not work, much as they inevitably pulled the wrong BNC connector from a "T" on a coax lan... sigh... being a perfectionist technogeek can be really frustrating sometimes.