Super User is a question and answer site for computer enthusiasts and power users. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
My network is currently like this:
DSL Modem (WIFI deactivated) - Netgear WLAN Router - Laptop
Is there a way to calculate the ping increase due to the Netgear WLAN Router instead of using the DSL Modems WIFI or LAN?
Is there a way to calculate the ping increase if an additional WIFI Repeater is used?
Latency is an ever-changing and hardware-dependent load-dependent value and cannot be precisely calculated. Even if you manage to find all latency values for your router, cable and network adapter, the sum is still too unrealistic (theoretical).
What you can do is:
Note that, as mentioned, latency is ever-changing and load-dependent. This method only gives you a LAN-loop latency, your Internet bandwidth and the remote server you're trying to reach also play a big role in a WAN environment.
If you're really asking if you can calculate it reliably so you can avoid just measuring it, then the answer to that is "no".
Here are some of the key components to the latency difference calculation:
A. Your DSL gateway's latency from DSL to Ethernet may be different from it's latency from DSL to Wi-Fi. How much that is, is impossible for us to know, because it depends on the device's internal implementation.
B. Minimum latency of a single Ethernet link is reasonably calculable if you know what flavor of Ethernet you're running: 10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T. But without knowing the Ethernet flavor, we can't calculate that.
C. Your Netgear router has a processing latency between Ethernet and Wi-Fi, but again, it's implementation dependent and we can't calculate it.
D. There may be an additional latency difference if your Netgear router uses a different flavor of Wi-Fi than your DSL gateway does.
So A and C are basically incalculable, and B and D might be somewhat calculable if we had more information, and the total latency change is A+B+C+D.
Overall it's easier if you just measure the latency increase yourself. It doesn't take too long to run some pings the way you have it right now, then hook things up the other way and run some more pings.
Have you tried using tools traceroute (GNU/Linux) or tracert pathping (MS Windows)? It would give you the round trip times per hop, and you could have a rough estimate how much latency potentially is introduced by additional hop.
There is a also a relevant topic discussion here: https://serverfault.com/questions/6403/what-do-the-three-columns-in-traceroute-output-mean
