Fixing a Slow Internet Connection

It is Christmas break and so my oldest son and I spent the afternoon setting up our PlayStation 4 consoles so we can kill bad guys together. Last night we saw the latest Star Wars movie and so naturally we plan to spend a fair bit of time playing Star Wars Battlefront.

This afternoon we got done skiing and decided that instead of playing split-screen coop we would each try playing on our own consoles. We set up a small monitor next to the big screen in the TV room and worked through the difficulties of having 2 consoles so close together. When we tried to initiate Share Play, we were told that my home Internet connection was too slow. So we pulled out some tools to see if we could fix the problem. The first was to bring in a laptop and run a speed test over the WiFi network. The tool of choice can be found at SpeedTest.net. I then ran another test on a computer hardwired into the home Internet connection. The wired connection tested at over 50 Megabits per second. The WiFi tested at only 2. That is a huge difference.

The next course of action was to try and figure out how we could speed things up over WiFi. My son introduced me to a tool on his Android phone called WiFi Analyzer from farproc. This showed us that all of my neighbors have their 2.5 Gigahertz WiFi routers all set up around channel 11. Guess where my WiFi connection was set? It was on "Auto" but was really using channel 11. My router only does 2.5 Gigahertz and so I manually set the channel to 3, where nobody seemed to be. I then reran the speed test and got much better numbers. Unfortunately they were not good enough for Share Play.

When trying to use Share Play you are told that it is best to use a wired Ethernet connection. Fortunately I have a large spool of CAT-5 cable and the tools to make Ethernet cables. We measured everything out and made 2 cables capable of reaching from the hub in my office to the PlayStation 4 consoles in the TV room. We tested the connection and the network ran sufficiently fast to use Share Play.

We got ready to play and then discovered that with Share Play, my son could watch me play or I could watch him. However we each couldn't play Star Wars Battlefront with only a single copy of the game. That was a bummer. Fortunately we each have a copy of the game and so we popped in the 2nd disk and have enjoyed several survival games together.

It is good that I now have enough network speed to use Share Play but the real problem turned out to be that we each needed our own copies of the game. I am glad we went through this exercise though as I now know a lot more about WiFi networking and have the tools to fix problems when they arise. Hopefully someone else finds this useful.