Wireless Internet And Chess

I have to move in about a month or so and the apartment I'm moving into already has wireless broadband set up in the house. I'm used to playing on Chess.com and ICC with a hard wired broadband connection and am wondering how stable wireless internet is with online chess these days? 

For the record - I know someone already using wireless internet at that location and they don't seem to have any issues but they're not really playing any competitive online games using it. 

Thanks

Is it wireless broadband that you will have to share with a lot of people? It depends on how many people and what meg the internet is. I have 30 MB internet and my wife is the only other person in my house using it. My connection is great. If it's wi fi shared by a whole apartment building, I would guess it would be sketchy.

No, it's not an apartment complex or anything. I think at most one or two (at most) other people would be using the connection and almost definitely not for gaming. 

You should run some speed tests and check your latency.  Latency is the big killer as I'm sure you know.  Personally, I'm on wireless and the router is two rooms away and the biggest improvement was getting a better wireless card in the laptop and moving to the 5ghz band since in an apartment setting the 2.4Ghz band was/is pretty saturated and packet dropping occurs regularly. 

My current recomendation would be to get an AC capable router and wireless card to get the best possible throughput currently available.

Similarly, a wired mouse or a higher quality wireless mouse will also pay dividends over a cheapo entry level version.

Cool, thanks. I'll bring my laptop and check out the latency the next time I stop over there. 

What kind of numbers am I looking to achieve here? Currently I have a 100mbps high speed cable connection. What would be a functional latency and upload speed with the wireless connection? 

Thanks again...

Interestingly enough a bigger pipe doesn't necessarily mean that it's actually faster for individual packets.  For years we had a very modest connection of 6down/256up and because the latency was low were able to game quite well.  It's with lots of video/music streaming; more users per connection that you need greater capacity.  The speed of the packets' round trip doesn't improve -- speed of light obviously being the limiting factor.

It all depends on the level of congestion and number of hops between you and the server.  In real terms a round trip of between 60 and 80 milliseconds per packet (latency) will mean your gaming will be good to reasonable. 

A tool like "WinMTR" is usefull for determining the quality of your connection to the server.  Just put "live.chess.com" (without the quotes) in the host line and let it run for a while.  The key number to look for will the be the average packet trip length per hop and you'd be looking for numbers generally around 80 milliseconds or less.  Naturally this can vary with time of day and general usage by the population at large of their respective internet connections.

Thank you again for the extremely detailed response. I'll dig into it...

You're welcome.  Good luck and good gaming.

Mine is fast enough for the latter but not for the former. Well, actually I guess it depends on the website. For example, on ...

Anyone want me to continue?

This is fantastic news. I'll get over there to watch some porn asap!