Maximum Latency for ISPs?

fluor2 asks: "My ISP is providing me 8mbit ADSL, and my speed is in fact 8mbit (downstream). However, we all know that there is no relation between transfer rate and latency, eg, a high transfer rate and high latency will kill your FPS games. A packet that travels through the sky and up to a satellite is bound to give high latency. Using pathping, I discovered that my ISP provides me with a latency of 22ms before my sent packets are sent out of my ISP's backbone (6 hops). I have a friend that also tried the same, and he got only 10ms before he was out of his ISP's network. I know 22ms is decent, but I still think that it's far too high if one uses IP-phones and similar. What kind of latency can we accept for a normal 8mbit ADSL connection, and isn't it about time that we get more focus on this subject?"

Comments

Spoiled

[medeii]

isn't it about time that we get more focus on this subject?

About time, sure. If I could get anything other than no-server cable, I'd be sure to jump on your bandwagon.

Can we focus on getting decent broadband to everyone first, and THEN start worrying about 12 ms of ping time? Good god, man.

Re:Spoiled

[MyGirlFriendsBroken]

Spot on. I have family who have almost never used the net and say hey wow you get that in your computer, how do ya do that, can I? (Streaming video and radio). Then you explain that they live in the UK and thus their exhange is not enabled yet (for ADSL) and even if it was you are probably too far from it to get broadband(512K/s up 256K/s down). All they really want is 128k/s upstream always on! Oh what is ti that I hear "thats that", not "oh we should do something about this," so give a thought to thouse who have to live with a 29K max connection! (I know the view out of the window is good, but that is no substitute!).

Why VoIP an issue?

[0x0d0a]

VoIP shouldn't be an issue. An additional hundreth or fiftieth of a second is not noticeable.

Re:Latency and Throughput

[bwt]

10ms is less than one refresh interval on your monitor, so you really can't "see" the difference.

For gaming, though you often have human race conditions. The frame is drawn, the two players see each other for the first time and hit the "fire" button. Whoever gets the message to the server first kills the other. Taking a .01 second hit absolutely can make a difference even if it is less than the frame redraw time. Consider all the Olympic events and horse races etc... that have been decided by such margins. Maybe you can "see" the difference, but the difference matters given that whoever is faster on the draw wins.

It Depends

[suwain_2]

It depends on how big your ISP is. If they immediately feed you out onto someone else's network (ie, if they're a tiny ISP or whatnot), you'll get low pings (in theory). A larger ISP (Adelphia, in my case) has like 8 hops before I go onto above.net, averaging 39 ms until I'm off adelphiacom.net. Latency on your ISP's network isn't necessarily a meaningful measurement. I'd be much more interested in ping times to certain hosts. I average ~80 ms, although this can vary hugely -- if I'm pinging sites in Asia, it'll obviously be a bit bigger.

Re:Latency and Throughput

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

And thats insecure game design. I'd rather have a game boil down to whoever has lower latency than whoever can hack their client to mangle timestamps.

A better method is what halflife does -- Check clients ping, check what they saw $ping ago, then process. The downside (for us LPBs, but upside for dialups) is I can run past a hallway, see an enemy a the other end, and keep running. then in ~400ms, I'm dragged back to the hallway because according to the server, they shot me.