Due to the location of our TV and gaming systems, I was forced to use wi-fi connections for our game consoles. Thankfully, the PS3 and Wii have built in wi-fi. Unfortunately, the PS3′s connection – particularly for downloads – seems to be dog-ass slow. Yes, that’s the technical term. The Wii’s connection has never been super speedy – downloads aren’t too bad, but they’ve always been pretty small.
I’ve never really had many problems playing games over wi-fi on the PS3, but I don’t do it that much to begin with. My online PS3 gaming has been either on Fat Princess or LittleBig Planet – both of have servers that tend to lag themselves at times. I had gotten used to setting PS3 demos and add-ons to download just before going to bed – so that they would be done in the morning. Song packs for Rock Band totaling at about 250mb would usually take a few hours to download. Sometimes, if I hit the servers at an unbusy time, I might be lucky and get that in about an hour.
It wasn’t until I got my XBox 360 a few months ago that I realized just how bad the PS3 connection really was. Now, I will note that I have an N adapter for the XBox – so there will always be an inherent speed difference as the PS3 does not support N connections. Still, even at G speeds, I should be getting better downloads than 100mb/hour. Confusing the matter more is that all three consoles are within a foot of each other. They’re all the same distance from the router and with the same obstacles and materials blocking signals.
Bored a few weeks ago, I set out searching for any tips or explanations as to just why the PS3 connection was so slow. Amongst things like setting up proxies for the PS3 to route through and some other strange ideas, I found two tips that sounded interesting.
1) If you have a mixed mode router, set it to “G Only”.
2) Disable Media Server Connections
I have not tried the first tip yet, as I need to tinker with my network setup first and just have not had the time or patience to do so. But last night, I wanted to download the PixelJunk game pack and decided to try out the second tip.
I originally had the Media Server Connections enabled so that I could stream from my Netgear Stora NAS
With it disabled, I purchased the PixelJunk pack and started downloading. The download totaled roughly 200mb – and all three were downloaded and installed in under 30 minutes.
As I understand it, leaving the Media Server Connections enabled makes the PS3 constantly ping out to the server to keep its connection. The extra traffic slows down the regular network traffic. If I needed to stream from my Stora, I could just re-enable the setting on the fly and disable it when I was done.
Has anyone else tried either of these, or have any other tips to speed up the wi-fi?
Found at the bottom of the system settings
Disable this when not in use
