Pick your battles carefully. You can throw a lot of hardware and labor at the problem to get minimal gains. Medium contention will continue to be an issue with ax. Right now we are hoping ax adoption gives us some efficiency gains in the next 2-3 years… or more likely in 4-5 years as client hardware refreshes. I think this comes down to cost and expectation. Over the lifecycle of your cable plant, it costs more to design/install/operate a voice quality network in the dorm than using existing wired connections (or installing new.) Our student expectation is for the game to work, not that it has to work on wireless. Yes, we have surprised some students that had no idea Ethernet existed. But, the cost of an Ethernet adapter and patch cable is pretty cheap vs trying to make dorm Wi-Fi perform as well as switched Ethernet.
In the dorms we offer students public IP addresses for game consoles using wired. This prevents the NAT issues with online game devices/services. Thus we get almost no complaints about game consoles on Wi-Fi…. even in the older coverage designed dorms. Our current path is to reduce switching capacity in dorms but keep offering wired connectivity as an option in the dorms. We are going from one port jack per pillow to one port per room. This year we are also piloting a few dorms with no jacks active and connecting them as needed. *Mike Atkins * Network Engineer Office of Information Technology University of Notre Dame *From:* The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv < WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> *On Behalf Of *Tom Mathews *Sent:* Tuesday, September 3, 2019 9:58 AM *To:* WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU *Subject:* [WIRELESS-LAN] Residential Wireless and Gaming This year we have decided to disable a substantial number of our wired drops on campus. Our studies have showed that less than 5% of the wired ports were used in an academic year in our residential spaces. For the most part we have very few complaints, except when it comes to playing server based games, such as Fortnite, Apex, Overwatch etc. The users complain of things like "lag", "Glitching" and "Rubber Banding". At quick glance, the rssi and snr shouldn't be an issue. They even state that access to campus resources and other internet activity is not an issue. We have not begun to deep dive into this issue. I am just curious if other folks have dealt with the same or similar issues with gamers on the wireless networks, and what was the fix. -- Thomas M. Mathews Network Engineer University of Dayton ********** Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and paste their email address and forward the email reply. Additional participation and subscription information can be found at https://www.educause.edu/community ********** Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and paste their email address and forward the email reply. Additional participation and subscription information can be found at https://www.educause.edu/community
