4 ms·
> As long as you have bandwidth latency really isn’t that important for most activities. As someone who recently spent a week at a vacation house that had Hugh
by wolrah 4y ago
> As long as you have bandwidth latency really isn’t that important for most activities.
As someone who recently spent a week at a vacation house that had HughesNet, you have no idea how wrong this is.
Every single individual request your browser makes has an extra half second attached to it even starting. Every TLS handshake takes a full second and a half, multiplied by every different host you're connecting to while loading content. Every packet lost (and there will be a few) has an extra half second to be resent. Downloading files over satellite internet isn't the worst thing in the world, but browsing the web over it is not an enjoyable experience. It feels like back when I was still on dialup while most of the internet had started to assume broadband.
The main reason QUIC exists as a protocol, aside from working around decades worth of horrible middleboxes that prevent new protocols from working on top of IP directly, is to reduce the number of back-and-forths required to establish secure communication which most significantly benefits high latency and mildly lossy connections like satellite and older cellular networks.
- matmatmatmat 4y agoI've done paid work on an airplane WiFi connection through Viasat and really did not find the latency to be an issue at all, including working in the terminal. No doubt everyone has different experiences and tolerance levels for latency, but, really, I think the latency issue is vastly overblown.