Ask Slashdot: What Is an Acceptable Broadband Latency?

holmedog writes "A simple question with a lot of answers (I hope). I recently had issues with my DSL broadband at home, and after a month of no resolution, I was told 300ms latency (to their test servers) was the acceptable range for Centurylink 10.0Mbps. This got a shocked reaction out of me to say the least. I would think anything over 125ms to be in the unacceptable range. So, I have come to you to ask: What do you consider to be acceptable broadband latency and why?"

Comments

Re:Latency

[Joce640k]

What exactly would he do? Latency is a function of all the hops between you and the other machine. I doubt they're going to reconfigure their network topology for a single user.

Re:Latency

[holmedog]

Hi! Thanks for the reply. To put some perspective - I've been troubleshooting this particular issue for ~1.5 months and have done the traceroute to make sure it is their issue and not mine. The 3rd hop hits one of their centers in a major city near me and that is the turning point.

I didn't include this in the original story as I figured it was far to specific to my case.

Re:Latency

[denzo]

Hi! Thanks for the reply. To put some perspective - I've been troubleshooting this particular issue for ~1.5 months and have done the traceroute to make sure it is their issue and not mine. The 3rd hop hits one of their centers in a major city near me and that is the turning point.

I didn't include this in the original story as I figured it was far to specific to my case.

Have you tried IM'ing CTL_Joey at the dslreports.com forums? I used to have CenturyLink, and there were always connectivity issues cropping up. He was usually able to have my issues resolved, or at least explain what was going on.