With a weak signal or interference, packets get resent several times over the wireless link, so they arrive unevenly.
Why Walls, distance, microwaves, Bluetooth, and neighbors’ routers degrade the radio signal → Effect Transmissions fail on the wireless link → resent several times → On screen Packets arrive unevenly (jitter), so characters move in fits and starts; with heavy loss, they teleport
Primary owner External (External) · Also Game team (Client development)
Game team action items
Adjust interpolation buffer length automatically to connection quality, show network status on screen when jitter or loss is high.
External action items
Tell players to use a wired connection, switch to 5 GHz or 6 GHz, and move the router.
Ballpark numbers
Each retransmission adds about 1–4 ms. With a weak signal, the radio resends several times at a low rate and also waits for the channel to clear, so latency can spike by 50–200 ms. The trap is that average ping looks fine.
On the graph
Random spikes · RTT to the router
Where to look
Ping the router address (Default Gateway in ipconfig) with ping /t for a few minutes, and check your router’s signal strength and channel with netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid. Compare over a wired connection from the same spot
Confirmed if
Even ping to the router spikes irregularly by tens to hundreds of ms with occasional loss, and signal strength is low. Gone on a wired connection or close to the router
Ruled out if
Steady up to the router but spiking beyond it: the connection or ISP segment. Spikes only at a fixed interval: “Wi-Fi background scanning”
Check with
The player’s own environment
Learn more
In mesh Wi-Fi, when the routers (nodes) link to each other wirelessly (wireless backhaul), a relaying node can’t send while it’s receiving and shares transmit opportunities with the hops before and after it on the same channel, so throughput can drop and latency can rise when the network is busy. Products with a dedicated wireless backhaul band may suffer less, and wiring the nodes together (Ethernet) takes this hop off the air. Powerline adapters (PLC) also check that the medium is free before sending (CSMA/CA), like Wi-Fi, and their quality changes constantly with electrical noise from appliances and with appliances switching on and off, which can cause retransmissions and jitter.
RFC 8325: Mapping Diffserv to IEEE 802.11IETF 802.11 CSMA/CA: sends only when the channel is clear; if it’s busy, defers until it clears, then waits an additional random backoff
Capacity of Ad Hoc Wireless Networks (MobiCom 2001)ACM When 802.11 relays over several wireless hops, a node can’t send while it’s receiving and adjacent hops interfere with each other, so the throughput of a chain of relays can drop to 1/3 in theory (about 1/7 in simulation)