SL on WLAN

From time to time I am logged on to SL through WLAN (lazy me reclining on the sofa ) and this is working surprisingly well. Textures take a long time loading, but that's unfortunately the same as in the wired LAN.

I know that using WLAN is discouraged for SL, so I would be interested if somebody really notices a difference between wired and wireless LAN?

(If somebody is interested: We have a 1.7/.2 Mbps ADSL line and a Linksys WAP4410N access point.)

I forget the specifics but I think the explanation is that SL does some strange things and exploits some networking quirks that are at least tolerated by wired standards but can entirely FUBAR (fuck up beyond all recognition) wireless connections because it doesn't comply with the protocols.

I've never heard of behavior issues that went against wireless networks for SL. I've always assumed it's just a performance issue, particularly before 802.11g became widespread. I use my laptop with an 802.11g adapter with no problem (or at least no more problems than people on wired LANs seem to have). I do this because I haven't gotten around to replacing an old 10MHz ethernet hub that serves some of the rooms at home; 802.11g tests out much faster than 10MHz wires. But if you have 100MHz wires, you'll get better performance than with an 802.11g wireless setup.

I've also never seen it called WLAN before, and that immediately struck me as being ambiguous. Apparently WLAN is a popular abbreviation in Europe for wireless network.

My first impression was SL on some sort of drugs myself...
I am always on wireless - yes I lag but other than a few places it is not horrendous.

That's my take, too. And with 801.n (draft) connections there is no noticeable difference to wire LAN at all.

Must be so. On my side of the pond the term is very common.

"WLAN" is fairly common around here as well.

On an 802.11n connection here, and not seeing any difference between that and wired LAN, except for occasional increased ping times and occasional dropped packets.

The proscription against wireless does not apply to 802.11 wireless routers in the house or wifi access points. A local 802.11 wifi network is much faster than the connection to the ISP (well, unless you are really special).

It does apply to *always on* wireless such as offered by cell phone providers, such as Verizon Broadband.

At least, that is what *I* think.

I guess I didn't realize that there were supposed to be issues with the wireless broadband internet and SL.....That's what I'm on and that's all I'm on...on a laptop also...and I live *almost* out in the middle of nowhere(7 miles to the closest town of less than 1,000 pop.) I've been very pleased with my performance and from what I can tell it's better for me than other people I've chatted with in SL. If it could get better than this, It'd be almost like watching SL on TV I suppose. Just my opinion.

Normal PC is on LAN and laptop on WLAN, the only difference I notice is the performance difference between the 2 machines.

Even when logging in on Normal PC on LAN with main AND logging on laptop with ALT does not give any decrease in performance or rezzing on either of the 2

The support note in the beginning mainly referred to wide area wireless networks and not anything based upon 802.11.
Either at the time or soon after this was published, 802.11b was becoming the norm and performance of SL on 802.11b was less than great due to an effect known as high latency.
High latencies is usually what makes wireless for SL useless.

Latency is the delay before, between and at the end of sending bursts of information. The sending itself can be very fast but the latencies surrounding it can be a killer. Latencies mainly affect movement in SL, making it jerky and leading what is known as the rubber-band effect.

Fast forward through to now, we have had 80211g which was much better than "b", SL works much better on this as new techniques for improving overall performance were implemented. Some 802.11g connections still suck because there is a wide variety of implementations that don't work well together and where they are placed. Environment plays a large part in performance of 802.11 technologies.
Now we have 802.11n, things have improved again and all things being equal, I doubt many people will have performance problems with SL and 802.11n, though the environment you are running wireless in will dictate the performance you get.

Wide area wireless is still pretty much out, why? even though they have also advanced, the improvments have pretty much concentrated on upload/download speeds and there has not been very much improvement in the areas regarding latency. I think a lot of it is to do with the technology limitations rather than not wanting to solve latency though.