Sure, wireless n is great and everything, but if you told me I’d be streaming media between 2-3 times faster through Microsoft’s new Xbox 360 Wireless Adaptor (802.11a/b/g/n) than their old a/b/g version, I’d never have believed you.
$149.95 RRP in Australia
If you upgrade to the new Xbox 360 Wireless Adaptor from the old, 802.11g version, you won’t notice any difference while gaming. But media streaming over your home network will see a legitimate speed increase.
For a moment, let’s ignore Microsoft’s traditionally ridiculous price for their Xbox 360 Wi-Fi adaptors. Instead, let’s just focus on performance.
Upgrading from 802.11g networking to 802.11n has a few key advantages: range is longer, speeds are faster and, since 802.11n sits on the 5GHz band, you won’t interfere as much with 2.4GHz frequencies used by 802.11g and basically everything else in existence.
But there’s one big thing that stops 802.11n from being any better than 802.11g for gaming: latency. Overall throughput may be faster on 802.11n (the pipe is bigger), but latency is really no less present than on 802.11g (it takes just as long for that first burst of water to come through). So those quick gaming commands aren’t faster on n, and my multiplayer testing (Modern Warfare 2 and Borderlands… it was a real chore) confirmed it.
Media streaming, however, is where those big throughputs pay off. Using Connect360, I streamed HD episodes of Mad Men from my Mac to the Xbox. I timed from the moment I hit play to to the first frame of video playback. And the difference was noticeable.
Buffering occurred between 2-3 times faster, which was well beyond my expectations, despite how fast 802.11n is on a spec sheet. Clips went from taking as many as 15 seconds to playing (rounding up) to actually breaking the five-second barrier. I’d love to have tested 1080p streaming over Live as well, but my DSL is the bottleneck in that scenario.
Yes, the Xbox 360 Wireless Adaptor is still profanely expensive. No, if you have an older adaptor (or you’re just using some other solution), I wouldn’t recommend the upgrade (nor do I think Microsoft is even marketing it that way). But it’s nice to see a tangible improvement all the same.
Streams intra network media between 2-3 times faster
Tiny form factor still unique to the industry
No perceivable speed increase in gaming
It’s $149.95.
Costs half the price of a new 360
It’ll set you back a month of dinners at McDonald’s.
I don’t even want to think about what that is in White Castles
josh
November 25, 2009 at 8:36 AM
when will this be avaliable?
Report Permalinkmatt
November 25, 2009 at 10:21 AM
ugh, wow, its faster – for streaming – and considering theoretically the old g standard is capable of streaming bluray quality (usually atleast 5 times more data than any HD stream) I wonder whats the point?
should really think about how you could run a wire before thinking of this.
Report PermalinkDrew Mewburn
November 25, 2009 at 11:48 AM
What the G standard is “theoretically” capable of is nothing like what it is “actually” capable of…
I’ve had the G Wireless adapter for my 360 for ages… But I hardly ever used it after the first month or so because it was so atrocious. But I also scraped G wireless in my house for anything other than basic web browsing because it suffered from so much from interference.
It should also be noted, that the G standard was little more than better encryption, so a plain text document could be sent through a lot faster than an already heavily encrypted video stream…
Anyway, for the time being, Cabling a house with a few network data points is still cheaper, and easier in the long run than upgrading everything to an N standard :(
Report PermalinkJoel
December 24, 2009 at 1:24 PM
I have a comment regarding the latency, as you mentioned your DSL bottlenecks when trying to run 1080p movies.
Wireless N is part of the new gigabit network, meaning you have to have internet speeds fast enough to get the full advantages. The reason the latency wasnt improved was probably because of your ISP/Internet Speeds.
I have a 20MBPS connection which is part of the gigabit family I notice a big difference in gaming because the gigabit wireless n router supports speeds of that nature.
So in another words of course network streaming is faster because its using its on N speeds to do the trasnfer, your gaming not so much because its using 100MBPS and when streamed over N it doesnt make a differnce.
Report Permalink