router problems

[timtheenchanter]

whilst wifi is usable for general use, IMO, its just not reliable enough for gaming.
It doesnt matter what it is, wi-fi, video senders, radio mics, £10000 of wireless kit, still will not be as relaible as £10 of cable, it just isnt.
I recently got a wifi scanner for my phone, and it has revealed to me, that there are 7 Wifi points overlapping my house, and own wifi APs, even getting the best settings, other still overlap my channels, and this causes packet loss.
In general use, you would probably never notice this loss, but for gaming, you probably will.

Its not just about the pure download speed, upload plays a big part in gaming.
What games is your son playing, some need higher uploads than others.
Lastly, your 2.5(ish) Mb/s d/l and 0.5 up presumably is whislt you were testing, with no other users on the net, how many devices are online normally, that 2.5M isnt going to go very far if you spread it between a few computers, smartphones etc etc.

 

[kjacko]

If the OP has dual band wifi 'n', then he could try switching to the 5GHz range as its much less congested than 2.4GHz.
BUT, as others have said the best connection for gaming is wired.
Wifi will ALWAYS give off packet loss and dropout, mostly without the user noticing especially if they're just browsing the internet, but for playing online games when packets are continually sent/received and data conitnually sync'ing you need a permanent uptime connection, and only wired gives you that.

 

[ICTRich]

I've just installed this week 12 dual band access points with a controller in a school. It works great with laptops, iPads, android tablets, phones etc. general browsing, streaming the odd video and web2 applications all run fine. This school is fairly remote in location and only 2 rogue access points are detected. Another sports club I did an install (with the same kit) for in the middle of a housing estate detected 19 rouge access points, I had all sorts of issues getting a stable solution, even at 5ghz. They ran a online gaming club with a few pc's and the lag was shocking. 1 8 port gigabit switch and some cat 5 cable later all was perfect.

My point is, in my opinion if you want to run data heavy applications on your computer like online gaming, it has to be a wired solution every time.

If I was the OP, I would get try and borrow a length of cable and just run it loose from the router to pc and see what the difference is.

Also consider the type of Ethernet card in your pc, not much point having a gigabit router/switch if your card is only 10/100.

Same apples to your wireless card, is it n or g?