3 ms·
I would really like details on latency. Bandwidth is all very well, but it's high latency that is so often the real limiting factor in browsing performance. I
by jfindley 9y ago
I would really like details on latency. Bandwidth is all very well, but it's high latency that is so often the real limiting factor in browsing performance. I live in a rural area, and my wired connection is very slow (~ 12Mbps). 4G competes well for bandwidth, but the latency (and the fact that the latency is highly variable) makes 4G unsuitable for general purpose internet use.
If 5G could be made closer to WiFi for both mean latency and latency stability it would have a potentially huge impact on broadband access in remote regions (assuming it's easier to deploy 5G there than fiber - which I think is true for most regions).
- iknowstuff 9y agoIn cities, I routinely get pings of about 40-50ms on LTE. I think it's well past the point of matching fixed broadband in that regard.
- jfindley 9y agoInteresting. Here (UK) fixed broadband is much better than that for latency. I ususually see 8-11ms on fixed broadband (DSL-based), yet my ping on 4G is generally more like 40-150ms, with lots of spikes.
- ilovecars2 9y agoEven rural broadband tends to average 30ms pings for idle connections. 4G, like you say, is massively variable.
- PeterisP 9y agoIsn't the latency mainly determined by congestion / bandwidth saturation on either the radio network or operator's backbone? IIRC the actual technological latency of a 4G link is just ~2 ms extra; the problem is that you have to share the link with many people, so if the network is overloaded you may get unstable latency. In this regard, anything that increases capacity would automatically help with latency as well.
- ilovecars2 9y agoYes, but also retransmission that happens at the physical/link layer to mask lossy links from higher layer protocols, such as TCP.