Ask Slashdot: What Is an Acceptable Broadband Latency? 396
holmedog writes "A simple question with a lot of answers (I hope). I recently had issues with my DSL broadband at home, and after a month of no resolution, I was told 300ms latency (to their test servers) was the acceptable range for Centurylink 10.0Mbps. This got a shocked reaction out of me to say the least. I would think anything over 125ms to be in the unacceptable range. So, I have come to you to ask: What do you consider to be acceptable broadband latency and why?"
Latency (Score:5, Informative)
I used to work for AT&T Uverse and over 200ms was enough to get a tech onsite to look at the problem.
Re:Latency (Score:5, Interesting)
What exactly would he do? Latency is a function of all the hops between you and the other machine. I doubt they're going to reconfigure their network topology for a single user.
Re:Latency (Score:5, Insightful)
PS: Talking of hops, tracert will show you how many hops are between you and their "test servers". Finding that out would be a good starting point.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
no, traceroute on linux uses UDP by default (you can make it use ICMP) whereas on Windows its ICMP only.
Re:Latency (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, you're wrong. It won't.
Yes it will:
PING slashdot.org (216.34.181.45) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from slashdot.org (216.34.181.45): icmp_seq=1 ttl=239 time=144 ms
64 bytes from slashdot.org (216.34.181.45): icmp_seq=2 ttl=239 time=140 ms
64 bytes from slashdot.org (216.34.181.45): icmp_seq=3 ttl=239 time=139 ms
Now go read about TTL [wikipedia.org] and apologize.
Re:Latency (Score:5, Informative)
Your comment assumes that all the devices and media between locations were functioning properly. Latency can also be caused by bad wiring, bad modem, etc. Hell, even line noise can cause it because the line noise forces re-transmits.
Re:Latency (Score:4, Insightful)
You shouldn't have posted AC, you're actually right on the money.
300ms could be that he has the line saturated with bittorrent traffic, or malware that he doesn't even know is there. It could be that his wireless connection is compromised, and the neighbor kid is downloading porn day and night. 300ms isn't acceptable, but likely isn't the provider's fault.
Why, oh why, don't more people monitor their bandwidth? Maybe I'm a statistical whore, but I always have some sort of bandwidth graphing up.
Re:Latency (Score:5, Interesting)
Hi! Thanks for the reply. To put some perspective - I've been troubleshooting this particular issue for ~1.5 months and have done the traceroute to make sure it is their issue and not mine. The 3rd hop hits one of their centers in a major city near me and that is the turning point.
I didn't include this in the original story as I figured it was far to specific to my case.
Re:Latency (Score:5, Informative)
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And it's possible that they've simple oversubscribed and the latency is simply the router stuffing packets as fast as it can through the uplink. It could be a bad routing table, but not as likely.
You need to do a 24 hour ping test and see if the latency has peak times or if the time is constant - this will usually tell you a lot and can be used when you speak with the provider.
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Agreed. WITH Bittorrent currently running, I am averaging about 100ms of latency on Charter. At 150ms, I start having issues. While a couple of my hops did hit that, once again, I am running Bittorrent. At 300ms, with nothing else running, I would be looking for a new ISP. That is the type of latency I would excpect on satelite - I got friends on Hughes Net, and that is about what they average on a clear day. If your third hop has those high latency, then my thought is that your ISP doesn't have a fiber lin
Re:Latency (Score:5, Interesting)
Hi! Thanks for the reply. To put some perspective - I've been troubleshooting this particular issue for ~1.5 months and have done the traceroute to make sure it is their issue and not mine. The 3rd hop hits one of their centers in a major city near me and that is the turning point.
I didn't include this in the original story as I figured it was far to specific to my case.
Have you tried IM'ing CTL_Joey at the dslreports.com forums? I used to have CenturyLink, and there were always connectivity issues cropping up. He was usually able to have my issues resolved, or at least explain what was going on.
Re:Latency (Score:5, Informative)
No, but if you point out that the latency between everything up to your street is low, and you have massive latency over the last two hops, it helps show them that something isn't normal.
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Re:Latency (Score:5, Informative)
In the much more unlikely scenario that the latency is being introduced by the network itself, the technician will usually escalate the problem and check both the street-side cabinet (DSLAM in this case), and customer profile at the B-RAS deep inside the provider network. It is not uncommon to see a low-speed DSL profile applied to a poor quality local loop, or for the wrong Layer 3 profile to be applied by provisioning error on the B-RAS itself. Both scenarios would result in poor performance for the user, leading to congestion and therefore, latency.
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Yes, but ISPs can make a big difference, as I mentioned on another post, I played an MMO 8 years or so ago, where the other players (pretty much all using TW, a few Comcast I think), complained of server lag at certain times, and experienced 500-1500ms latency. With my DSL connection, I was getting 75-100ms latency at the same time - not server lag. Some users were farther from the west coast servers than me, most were closer, pretty much all of them had higher-throughput connections than me. Local maintena
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Yes, the last hop to the customer usually has the highest latency, but anything higher than 100ms for that is poor.
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I should know, I managed the connection for one for 3 years.
If you have a 15ms report from speedtest, then your Isp is either providing the server space itself, or is the Isp for the company that is hosting it.
This is good for testing your last hop speeds, but not for getting an accurate estimate of your Internet speeds.
(I can get 75Megabit/11ms to other businesses on the same Isp node, but our speed to the ne
Re:Latency (Score:4, Interesting)
I had AT&T's DSL and did some gaming. I live in Ohio, and the servers were west coast. I typically had 75-100ms latency when the TimeWarner users were complaining about server lag and 500-1500mls latency. When they were down to 150-200ms (good for them), I typically hovered around 50-60ms.
This was 7-8 years ago.
IMHO, 300ms is unacceptable.
My current cable gives me around 100ms average latency with SW:TOR.
To me, "acceptable latency" comes with the type of service, and the distance to the target. This covers my views with servers in the continental US:
With my previous DSL experience, I would be pissed with a DSL service that had 100ms or more latency except at the busy hours
With cable, I expect upwards of 200ms, but the average should be closer to 100-150ms.
With WiFi in the equation, I'd add a bit more, and be surprised if it were less than +50ms, but would still be pissed if it were more than +100ms.
Mind you though, this is from anecdotal experience, YMMV.
Re: (Score:3)
Wow.
I have 5ms (five milliseconds) from my home to my office. And they're about 10 km. apart, and not on the same ISP (there are 5 hops in the route between them).
That's what I call 'good latency'. Now, a decent latency for most connections inside the country would be around 20ms. A decent latency to major out-of-country resources should not exceed 70-100ms. Hop across the Atlantic ocean should not add more than 120-150ms.
Re:Latency (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, I used to do tech support and anything over 100 ms or so for the first hop outside the ISP's network was likely to be escalated to a 3rd line tech if we couldn't solve it.
Hell, right now I'm getting approximately 100-120 ms pings against random machines in the US northeast and around 190-200 ms for the west coast and I'm in northern Sweden...
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I used to work for AT&T Uverse and over 200ms was enough to get a tech onsite to look at the problem.
Most likely, you mean latency to a local test unit (perhaps where the uplink switches are).
FYI, my latency is below 4ms to my ISP's speed test machine, about 46ms to 8.8.8.8 (google's public DNS), but around 150ms to slashdot. It depends a lot on the routers and the termination hardware as well as the number of hops.
How are you measuring latency? (Score:4, Interesting)
The first question I'd have about high latency numbers is how you're measuring them. Lots of devices are pretty slow about responding to pings and traceroutes. (Big routers, in particular, tend to make that a much lower priority than routing packets or doing other useful work, and the ping response comes from the CPU. while the actual packet routing happens in ASICs.) On the other hand, doing a traceroute to some distant site can let you see a bunch of dubious measurements, and the smallest numbers tell you a lot because they're a ceiling on the latency of everything up to that point. I've also seen throughput measurement tools that think sending 18000-byte pings is a good idea, and they're not only hopelessly broken for measuring throughput, they get really entertaining latency results as well. The quick and dirty test is "ping 8.8.8.8" followed by "traceroute 8.8.8.8", which points you to Google's anycasted DNS servers.
Traceroute also gives you some hints about routing - if you're in San Francisco, and your route to google.com is going by way of New York, something's weird with your ISP's peering. (I've seen that kind of thing happen - the user's ISP in Denver had recently moved, so their upstream link to the Tier 1 the user's headquarters used was down for a couple of months until they got a bigger access line built to the new site, and their ISP's other Tier 1 upstream didn't peer with the first Tier1 in Denver, and the San Francisco peering was overloaded back then so they were getting routed somewhere awkwardly far away.) But even so, it's really hard to burn more than an extra 120ms with bad routing unless you cross an ocean. (That's two extra round-trips across North America, or dancing around Europe; Asian users can occasionally get weird routes.)
The next thing to do is be sure you're really really not running anything else while running your latency tests. Jim Gettys's "Bufferbloat" paper is really insightful, and you need to read it (but don't measure your latency while you're downloading it :-) A typical latency problem is that you're trying to download more bandwidth than something on your access line can support (such as your wifi router), so the device buffers traffic, and what you're really seeing is that bittorrent or big http transfer is filling up your wifi to maximize throughput, which is trashing your latency. Or alternatively, you've got something hogging your upstream, making it difficult for ACKs on downstream traffic to get through.
Latency (Score:5, Funny)
First pos... Dammit!
300 Acceptable? (Score:3)
Maybe if you're coming from off-continent.
300ms is the typical latency of an analog modem.
Re:300 Acceptable? (Score:5, Informative)
I consider anything past 80ms to be slow for my cable connection (to 8.8.8.8).
I just tested 19,17,18,18
I previous test had a 60 something thrown in. This is via a boring home VPN router, shared connection, but under a dozen, and all light users.
13 hops to 8.8.8.8 from here.
33,34,33,63 to /.
300 is what I get on hotel wifi, or my cellphone (to be fair, on my cell phone it goes up to 1000), as can hotel wifi become unusable, I swear most hotels must have 300+ rooms sharing a T1 line.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:300 Acceptable? (Score:5, Informative)
Generally 1ms or less.
Pinging one of my servers in co-lo on the other side of London and traversing my moderate-speed (~4Mbps/1Mbps) ASDL only takes just over 14ms round-trip.
Pinging my server in the US gives ~110ms.
Singapore: ~270ms.
Sydney, Australia: ~310ms.
So I can get right round the globe and back in about 300ms, *starting* the trip over ADSL.
Rgds
Damon
Rgds
Damon
Re:300 Acceptable? (Score:5, Funny)
Pinging DamonHD [794830] with 32 bytes of data:
Rgds
Damon
Rgds
Damon
Re: (Score:2)
I ping 16 or 17 to google. .4 or .5 to my router 1 to my router's router.
7-10 to the gateway on the other side of my modem.
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Hahaha, first thing I thought of when I saw the post about latency over a modem+phone line.
I pwned at Nar Shaddaa. Tower and Drazen Isle were my favorite maps, though. Hell, I wish every multiplayer shooter had a game mode like the one in the Drazen Isle map.
Re: (Score:2)
200 ms from Florida to Tokyo, just now.
235 ms from Florida to Sydney, Australia.
If you're getting over 200 ms for connections across the US, something is horribly wrong.
Normal speedtest results from Florida to Washington DC are in the 25 ms range...
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No need to be anon to post that... it's true.
Hell, back in the day I averaged 250ms from a 28.8K modem connection in rural Arkansas... (28,800 was the best you could hope for given the local telecom infrastructure, no matter how fast your modem was). An LPB (low-pinged bastard) could average 100ms to many servers, and latency of 50 wasn't unheard of.
Mind you, this was in 1998-1999.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm surprised you got the full 28.8. Usually you'd end up at 26,400 bps because the telco was running you through a muxer, giving you only enough frequency spectrum for a voice call.
The #1 issue that modem companies would get calls on with 56k modems, was "I can only ever connect at 26,400!" It was a magic number that meant that your telco was screwing you with your pants on.
Latency is the forgotten casuality... (Score:5, Insightful)
...of the broadband wars. All consumers really seem to care about is faster download speeds, so networks offer it - by munging up their network so much that latency is measured in seconds. With the death of the network engineer, people just aren't educated enough to realize that part of the whole broadband experience is getting your packets sent and received fast, not just your GET or retrieve request getting all the data it asked for quickly. If you have to wait more than a second or two for your requests to even get there, then most people are gonna give up and try somewhere else.
Re:Latency is the forgotten casuality... (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends... (Score:4, Informative)
What are you using your connection for?
If you're sending emails, then 300 is perfectly fine.
Turn based games would be fine. Real time games would be rough.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
300ms is the serialization delay on a 56kbps modem. Doing any modern email with any sizable attachment would be painful at best and would more likely experience timeouts. Browsing the web with 300ms of delay would be painful.
Keeping in mind that this delay is apparently inside his ISP network I think that there is no reason that he should accept 300ms unless his ISP is an inter-island carrier and the test servers are on another island or something.
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Escalate your trouble ticket (Score:2)
Request an escalation of your trouble ticket. No reasonable person would expect 300ms latency as the norm.
Re:Escalate your trouble ticket (Score:4, Informative)
Yup, I'd say 10ms is not uncommon for modern
The FCC Says:
Results by ISP. The highest average round-trip latency among ISPs
was 75 ms, while the lowest average latency was 14 ms.
This is from "Measuring Broadband America - FCC" found on the FCC website.
Re: (Score:3)
No one can define your requirements (Score:4, Insightful)
We can't really tell you what's "acceptable". That ultimately depends on what you're using it for.
Maybe the right question is, are you getting a worse ratio-vs.-price situation than is found in most markets in your country?
Or are you asking whether or not the provided is in breach of the law because they're offering something so bad that their advertising is deceptive?
Re: (Score:2)
Or are you asking whether or not the provided is in breach of the law because they're offering something so bad that their advertising is deceptive?
I see what you did there...
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That makes one of us...
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It all depends on distance... (Score:4, Informative)
I can't see 300ms being acceptable anywhere in North America unless you are on a satellite link, however if you are testing over continents then yes.
Testing to the providers own test servers within the same country seems insane to be that high.
Nothing but the best for me. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nothing but the best for me. (Score:5, Funny)
Denon makes one of those, I think, and for only a few thousand dollars more it can include a high-speed copper track to provide a stable surface the electrons can travel on.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, you mean this one?
http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/dp/B000I1X6PM [amazon.com]
The reviews are amazing.
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Holy Collisions Batman (Score:2)
Location of Test Servers (Score:5, Insightful)
Just where exactly are these 'test servers' in relation to you? What, exactly, was this 'test'? This seems a bit of a worthless test. It's entirely possible your DSL has less than 100 ms latency, but the delay is on the server end or the links in between. This is too vague a scenario to comment on.
My feelings about 'acceptable' latency depend on how much I am paying for it, at what bandwidth, with what level of SLA, and for what purpose.
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FWIW, I have CenturyLink 12.0mb/s DSL in the Seattle metro area. I just pinged their (CenturyLink's) local DNS server (205.171.3.x) from my router, and have latency consistently in the 20-25ms range - which I consider perfectly fine. (traceroute shows five hops total, bwt, all in the qwest.net network).
Pinging Google's public DNS server, outside of qwest.net at 8.8.8.8, gives 7
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We now return you to more competent geek programming.
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Depends on what you're connecting to... (Score:3)
For what? (Score:2)
For gaming 100ms is shit. For general browsing 300ms is still pretty poor, but not the end of the world on a cheap and nasty connection.
It really depends, but for you, 300ms is high. (Score:2)
It really depends on 'to where you measure' and 'under what conditions' and 'what technology'. EG, satellite broadband will just have bad latency, period. Its the nature of the beast. And cellular/wireless can vary all over the place.
But for fixed, land-line connections? I'd say well under 50ms of latency for the last hop, so perhaps 125ms latency max to an in-ISP test server (giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming 75 ms latency to their test server because its somewhere in the middle of the
Re: (Score:2)
I've got latency under 200ms from a wifi connected laptop on one side of my house, over a VPN, to a friend's network 1800 miles away (probably closer to 3000 network miles) - to his laptop. 300ms is absurd.
This is why I have DSL (Score:2)
Anything over 60ms screws up VoIP badly. Comcast builds in buffering in the modems to cause latency and jitter.
These ISP's are getting as bad as the crap Dial up guys in the late 90's.
Latency has a couple of sources... (Score:5, Insightful)
When you say the word "latency" most tech-savvy folks think about the propagation speed of the technology (e.g. electricity in copper, or light in fiber), and thus assume it's basically proportional to distance.
However, latency comes from other things as well. Serialization delay adds latency, and the lower the symbol speed the more it adds. Multiaccess media adds latency while waiting to transit. Multiplexing anything adds a small amount of latency looking for a time slot.
The biggest culprit? Bufferbloat. This is a term that has been coined to describe the fact that many networking devices have entirely too much buffer. In the best case someone has sized the buffer for the max line rate that device may see (perhaps 25Mbps for your DSL modem, when your link is only 10Mbps), in the worst some misguided engineer thought "more == better" when figuring out how much to buffer, or just didn't care. There are a number of efforts to try and fix this poor situation, http://www.bufferbloat.net/ is the place to start. Basically buffers add latency. A small amount of buffering increases throughput, but beyond that it does nothing but increase latency and generally make the user experience crappy. When the link is full you need to drop packets _quickly_, because that's the signal to TCP to back off. Packet loss is a _good_ thing on a full link.
Try running ICSI's Netalyzr (http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/) which will attempt to estimate your uplink and downlink buffering. If you have a "router" in front of your DSL modem it may have some tuning, or "QoS rate shaping" that will help. If it's a device provided by your service provider you may not have access to the settings, and it may simply be configured wrong. With some vendors asking for a different model of device may help, with others, you may be screwed.
The technologies involved should deliver 20ms latencies if properly configured. You should absolutely expect that, but getting them to acknowledge a problem may take latencies over 50ms. If your service provider thinks 300ms is normal, you need to escalate or move to a different provider.
Mod Parent Up Please (Score:3)
He's spot on. The other question is how you're measuring the latency - lots of systems place a low priority on responding to pings, for instance.
Re:Latency has a couple of sources... (Score:4, Informative)
Depends on what you're doing. (Score:2)
I'd have no problem with 300 most of the time, but I'm not a fan of multiplayer games that require twitch reflexes, nor do I do anything significant on OnLive.
Another place you might have trouble is streamed content -- this is one of the reasons I do not like streamed content. I'd much rather use the model of "download the content, use it, and then discard it", which is much less sensitive to latency, lets you get higher quality regardless of bandwidth (as long as you allow the download time to be longer t
where is there test server? (Score:2)
None. (Score:2)
I'm paying for a service, I expect no less than my minimum promised broadband.
CenturyLink (Score:2)
My CenturyLink 10Mbps DSL in WA State delivers 65ms ping to a Google DNS server. I get 6-7ms ping to their gateway. It's rock solid unless my connection is saturated. They were significantly oversubscribed and were listing our area as having an "outage" for over a year before they finally got our backbone upgraded, but it's amazing now. You can ask them to switch you from Interleaved mode to Fast mode if your line is decent. That can reduce your ping time significantly. But it sounds like they have some oth
300ms? To what servers? (Score:2)
I consider anything >10ms to servers located within my ISP to be absolutely unacceptable. However I'm on a fibre link so my viewpoint is kinda skewed.
When I was on a DSL link (1998 - 2002) if I got >50ms to servers at my ISP I started looking at what may have been clogging my link (in one case I did a data capture and proved to the ISP that one of their Cisco routers was misconfigured and spewing garbage) and then started planning to lay siege to the ISP.
However given that you're dealing with an ISP t
Results from Speedtest.net? (Score:2)
I don't know what test servers you're referring to, but typically when I test a client's internet connection with speedtest.net using the automatically found best server I get results under 50ms. I would imagine anything over 100ms to a nearby server indicates some kind of network mismanagement.
I also have clients using satellite connections. Their latency is typically around 750 to 900 ms.
On their network anything 20 unacceptable (Score:2)
If you have over 300ms latencies to servers inside your ISP's own network then I would definitely call that unacceptable. With my ISP and fastpath enabled I often get 20ms to servers within the same country. Anything over 60 and I wouldn't be able to feed my Counter Strike addiction ;)
300ms is ludicrous (Score:2)
50 ms (Score:2)
Personally I'd complain if it was anything over 50 ms for wireline. Wireless you are going to see higher; for satellite 300 ms is probably good (but I don't think you can get 10 mbps over satellite yet). With DSL I had ~13-20 ms reported to nearby test servers (well, ~70 miles as the car drives). Switched to U-verse recently, now I get about 22-30 ms to the same server on a bonded pair (interleaved). Don't think I've ever gone above 30 ms to test servers, but then I've only ever had DSL or a T1 at college (
If it anit..... (Score:2)
Less than 30 forget about it.
Determine The Cause (Score:2)
Generally speaking, on a 10Mbps broadband connection I would expect 1-3 milliseconds to the first hop and a few milliseconds per hop additional inside the regional network.
If you start hopping to other continents or if you're located on an island and have to have a satellite uplink or long haul inter-island or intercontinental fiber then you need to adjust your expectations upwards from there. Figure on a half second delay for a satellite link (accounts for both up and down) - 300 isn't enough for satellit
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Working at an ISP (Score:3, Informative)
Some measurements (Score:2, Interesting)
I do have a 10 Mbps DSL at home with the following ping time statistics:
First hop to ISP over DSL line in Finland: 22 ms
City 500 km away within the same ISP network: 33 ms
International connection to 10 hops and about 2500 km away: 50 ms
International connection over some European countries and over Atlantic to New York (~8000 km): 125 ms
Continuing journey from New York to Tokyo, Japan (lots of kilometers): 300 ms
How far is their test server anyway?
Depends on the Server (Score:2)
A better test would be to do a trace route to google or yahoo and see how long that takes.
150 and less is decent to a server that's not being hammered, but latency for other things like Warcraft have additional things adding to it not just the connection so 300 is kinda hi
Very slow for DSL... (Score:2)
From
http://www.dslreports.com/faq/694 [dslreports.com]
DSL/Cable 10-20ms
For Comparison (Score:2)
Some points for comparison: https://wondernetwork.com/pings/ [wondernetwork.com]
With only 282ms you can get a ping from Amsterdam to Hong Kong.
Latency maps and looking glass servers (Score:2)
Latency depends on your destination. It is limited by the speed of light, and governed by how lousy the link itself is. It's how you sometimes get stories like the 500 mile email [ibiblio.org]For some reference points:
A map of expected United States latency [fellowshipone.com] from some place in Texas.
Often times your first hop on DSL will be slower... my own network right now shows 40ms to my ISP's gateway. 300ms is my ping time from Maine in the US to Australia.
Another helpful source of references are looking glass servers [traceroute.org] that will let y
300ms, seriously? (Score:2)
300ms is usable, but not by much. Like in all things, it depends on what you're doing.
For an ssh connection, that's almost unusable. I'd not want to use it for much of anything.
For an AJAX web app, that will probably be unusable unless it was tested with such high latencies in mind and written by competent programmers.
For gaming, you can forget about it. 300ms is about 50% more than maximum for what was playable for network games, 15 years ago, and it'll probably prevent gaming outright on many modern platf
as you suspected, they are full of shit (Score:2)
I am on CenturyLink DSL, 1.5Mbps sadly, and I get about 100ms latency across the country. As good as 90ms from CO to AL. As much as 125 or so to locations further away.
In my opinion, CenturyTel is run by idiots... (Score:3)
I had a VPN customer on CenturyLink and a previous network engineer had put their home office LAN on 192.168.1.xxx (which is pretty common). The outlying offices were on 10.x.x.x subnets. One day, suddenly, no one could reach the home office file server. I discovered that there was a whole collection of computers with 192.168.1.xxx addresses on the WAN side of the routers. This, of course, broke the VPN links. He didn't just have them on that subnet but he had addressed one as 192.168.1.1 and up through a numerical sequence. When I finally got through to the chief admin guy (in Portland, OR) and told him he had internal IP addresses on a routable network he responded that the WAN side of our network was his INTERNAL network and he saw nothing wrong with putting a bunch of servers on those IP addresses. Nothing could convince him otherwise, either... because he was studying to take his Cisco Certified Network Administrator test.
We readdressed the home office (that was fun!) and then moved to a better provider; one who at least would listen.
Drop them like a hot potato (Score:2)
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Just venturing a guess (Score:2)
Yea I would think you should be somewhere in the ~100ms range - and that's just barely adequate. To your ISPs server you should be getting under or around 60. I think for online gaming they say you should be under 80 but I could be wrong on that.
For reference, I get 149ms ping on my cellphone with a shitty connection.
10 ms (Score:2)
I have a 1.5 Mbs DSL line to Cavalier telephone. Pretty slow throughput-wise, but my pings to 8.8.8.8 are 10ms.
It's pretty good for gaming.
I do better than that (Score:2)
My phone does 100ms via UMTS or HSDPA. My cable connection at home is stable at 60-75ms typically, and I hate my modem for somany other reasons.
125ms is below what should be a standard. Rotsa ruck getting it fixed.
This is my hugest issue with broadband today (Score:2)
When I had Speakeasy (RIP) I had latencies of around 10ms. With Century link they have been anything form 40ms to 200ms at various times. And this was to the next hop after my modem. I consider latencies about 20ms to be annoying. 100ms is way too high for the hop from my modem to their router.
Hops after that are really hard to come up with values for since there is so much that can affect latency. But IMHO, if the broadband provider can't give you a link with less than 20ms latency from your modem to the n
Buffer Bloat - latency is only going to get worse (Score:2)
http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Issues/2011/127/Security-Lessons-Bufferbloat/%28kategorie%29/0 [linuxpromagazine.com]
In this article, I’m not going to talk about an emerging technology (don’t get me wrong, I love new technology) but about something even more interesting: An emergent behavior that was never expected: bufferbloat.
Bufferbloat is not a recent phenomenon; however, it has only recently been uncovered and understood, and developers will likely be grappling with it for some time. Additionally, this problem, if left unchecked, will make the Internet painfully slow to use, greatly reducing the availability of services. Remember, availability is one of the three legs of the AIC triad (along with integrity and confidentiality).
So when people say "congestion causes slow networks" they are quite often right, but not for the reasons they think they are. Case in point: my Cablemodem ping times to www.seifried.org are nice and fast, until I saturate my uplink (with even just a single upload stream) at which point the latency increases to one second (in a semi-linear fashion over a few seconds, you can almost hear all the buffers getting fil
haha (Score:2)
Why are so many of you posting like you know what you are talking about when you clearly don't know the difference and relationship between latency and bandwidth.
Filter (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Sometimes that isn't possible.
I use CenturyLink out here in the sticks, and my wee 8Mbit line averages 36ms to the nearest test server according to speedtest.net. Picking something known to be slow, such as a former employer's UEN (Utah Education Network) server gives me 77ms. SanFran from here (Oregon) gives me 56ms. Funny thing is, it even feels snappier than my previous Comcast line in Portland, which was an alleged 20Mbit (latencies were dog-slow, 80-100ms at times at level best).
A lot of it depends on
Re: (Score:2)
Also, that first-hop of 10ms is likely your ISP's B-RAS - your Layer 3 gateway to the Internet, usually deep inside the CO and still a couple hops away from the Internet. Again, you have exceptional service if the B-RAS is 10ms awa