6 ms·

30-100ms is better than I feared, and should be generally reasonable for most uses.

• read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  30 is really good actually. At least for what I’m used to.
  • kalleboo 6y ago
    On my home fiber, pretty much all sites I visit are like 80 ms away, Starlink would be an upgrade for me, latency-wise
• j-krieger 6y ago
  anything above 100 ms is starting to get into unusable territory for quite a few applications
  • capableweb 6y ago
    Count yourself lucky you don't live in either South America, Africa or Asia, where +100ms latency is more common than not. Fortunately I can count on one hand the applications that don't work with +100ms latency (not counting gaming). Usually it's the fault of the application developers (or rather the infrastructure team) where they put too low timeouts for requests rather than letting the requests go for a bit longer. Sub 100ms for satellite internet is incredible, hopefully it'll be cheap enough for people to actually get, compared to the current satellite internet we have. Can't wait for humanity to become a multi-planet species, as then application developers would have to start taking multi-minute latencies into account, and hopefully that'll help me as someone with ~500ms latency to most services.
    • ColoradoDev 6y ago
      > Fortunately I can count on one hand the applications that don't work with +100ms latency (not counting gaming). Pardon my ignorance, but what are some exampes of applications that wouldn’t work with +100 latency?
      • capableweb 6y ago
        Depends on where on the +100ms range we're on. Once you start hitting 1s latency, lots of applications (or rather, their servers) have a hard limit on 1s for every request. So when loading data from the backend, you have to continue to retry the request until it gets below 1s and then you will finally get the data. I think Adobe been one of the worst companies I've dealt with personally, as many of the endpoints have ridiculously low timeouts (for someone with really shitty latency).
      • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
        Voice chat is obnoxious with more than a few tens of ms latency. Around about 100ms things stop appearing instantaneous, beyond the scope that everything starts to suck if you're not a patient person.
      • jillesvangurp 6y ago
        Gaming and video conferencing come to mind. Videoconferences need bandwidth for obvious reasons but it's also nice if you don't have any delays in when you says something and when the other side hears it. I've been in some calls lately with very noticable delays. Especially people joining from mobile phones tend to be affected (shit latency, variable bandwidth).
      • fluffything 6y ago
        Anything that requires real-time interaction between a client and a server and other clients, e.g., gaming, stadia/geforce now, videoconferencing, ... < 100ms is usually the "minimum", > 150ms is often "unusable", and for a smooth experience you might need < 30ms depending on the application (e.g. depending on the game you might need < 90ms or <60ms or <30ms).
        • Dylan16807 6y ago
          Videoconferencing does not need imperceptible latency. The other two things on your list are both gaming.
          • 6y ago
    • mschuster91 6y ago
      > Can't wait for humanity to become a multi-planet species, as then application developers would have to start taking multi-minute latencies into account, and hopefully that'll help me as someone with ~500ms latency to most services. Stuff that requires realtime (or near realtime) communication simply won't be possible. What remains is bulk data transfer, here I guess the only viable way is: 1) on both ends in both directions, massive buffers (at least bandwidth x 4) 2) massive FEC (of course it will reduce the net bandwidth, but there's no real other way to avoid lots of retransmissions) 3) sender station transmits the data in blocks, with each object of data having a specified number of blocks 3) receiver station checks all the data blocks for integrity, places it in buffers, and transmits back a list of broken blocks and a list of successfully received blocks 4) sender station receives the list of broken/successful blocks, deletes successful blocks from its buffer and retransmits those marked as broken 5) receiver station waits until all the blocks for an object of data have been successfully transmitted, and delivers the message to the recipient system
      • capableweb 6y ago
        Yeah, in short: content-addressable systems are needed if we're ever to send data between planets on a larger scale. Systems like IPFS and alike solves this problem nicely, at least in my tests with high-latency scenarios.
      • skissane 6y ago
        We already have a protocol spec for stuff like this https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5050 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5050 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dtn-bpbis-26 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dtn-bpbis-26
• jfindley 6y ago
  Consistent 30ms would be pretty excellent, and make it useful for many things. Consistent 50ms, similarly. It starts to get a bit more of an issue at 80ms or 100ms, but my worry is more that jitter may be huge, and 30-100ms is a huge jitter window that could limit usefuless not just for games, but also many other things such as voice calls.
  • krageon 6y ago
    A 100ms ping is perfectly playable in everything except twitch-based shooters. In voice calls you will notice it, but it won't get in the way like say a 1-2s delay would (like you get if you phone from one end of the world to the other). It's really a very good result bearing in mind that this can work absolutely anywhere.
    • phinnaeus 6y ago
      Fighting games, too. Most gamers know to avoid wifi, much less a wireless ISP.
      • ricardobeat 6y ago
        I don't think that's still true with 802.11ac. My Wi-Fi adds only 1 or 2 ms latency. There is way more jitter, but it doesn't really matter if the total is always under 10ms.
      • gameswithgo 6y ago
        wifi doesn't add any latency, inhernetly. nor in practice with actual equipment
        • andruby 6y ago
          The shared medium (frequency spectrum) is what can add latency. If a device wants to talk over Wifi but another device is transmitting it has to wait. This introduces (variable) latency, aka jitter. Here's an anecdotal example for you, in practice with actual equipment: 1) Mac pro via ethernet to router: # ping -c 5 -S 192.168.1.88 192.168.1.1 PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) from 192.168.1.88: 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.413 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.396 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.417 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.553 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.514 ms 5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.396/0.459/0.553/0.063 ms 2) Same machine via wifi over Unify AP to router: # ping -c 5 -S 192.168.1.72 192.168.1.1 PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) from 192.168.1.72: 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=2.992 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=4.136 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=1.873 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=2.293 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=2.552 ms 5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 1.873/2.769/4.136/0.774 ms That's an average of 2.3ms extra latency, or 6x higher.
• coding_lobster 6y ago
  What sort of areas is low latency important in outside of video games?
  • benhurmarcel 6y ago
    Finance, stock trading. Theoretically Starlink should eventually have lower latency than the optical cables under the Atlantic.