4 ms·
People always complain about Latency. But Latency to where? And is latency in Asia or the Caribbean or anywhere else outside of North America that bad? Nah. I
by eric4smith 6y ago
People always complain about Latency.
But Latency to where?
And is latency in Asia or the Caribbean or anywhere else outside of North America that bad? Nah.
In 2020, latency from almost every continent is good enough for 99.99% of use cases.
Good enough that I can sit here in Bangkok and use Vim all day remotely into servers in Texas without any difficulty.
Starlink will be awesome for the majority of the world. Even "gamers" (if the pricing is good).
- jfindley 6y agoI don't think putting quotes around the word gamers helps you get your point across particularly effectively - it sounds like you don't really think it's important enough of a usecase to be worthy of much consideration. Many years ago, before life got so busy, I used to play FPS games online over various forms of dialup and then (somewhat) faster links. Bandwidth was fine, if you were patient about downloads, but latency caused real problems, even on "good" days when you could get close to 100ms on some of the better links. In short, 100ms latency (taken from another thread) is definitely enough to cause problems for many games, and would also make things like stadia/geforce now/playstation now not viable. This doesn't mean it's not useful tech - I can think of many useful applications, but I don't think we can just handwave away all the cases where 100ms of latency might, actually, cause an issue.
- nopcode 6y agoStarlink aims to achieve sub 20ms latency. This is OK for gaming, especially with modern shooters.
- jfindley 6y agoDo you have a source? A link in a different thread paints a somewhat different picture. If they can achieve stable ~20ms latency though, that would indeed be excellent.
- capableweb 6y agoWhile latency is more important than bandwidth for most games, jitter is even more important. Lower latency is obviously better, but under what duration? If it fluctuates between 10ms and 50ms, while only being 20ms for short periods, many games will have problems with this, rather than a 50ms constant latency where the game servers can start accounting for it without issues.
- nopcode 6y agoExactly. Elon confirmed the target is <20ms and <10ms over time.
- oliwarner 6y agoGoing from 5-10ms to 30-90ms* might take some getting used to. That's on top of geographic latency. Chrome's devtools will let you simulate this. It's not pretty but it is better than nothing. * Yes yes yes, Elon promises better than that, but 30-90ms is what it's currently tested at.
- joshxyz 6y agoYep, except for FPS & RTS games involving fast hands and quick minds. Anything more than 75 ms is gonna hurt your reflexes.