Why does every ISP, office space provider, et al, talk only about bandwidth and never about latency?
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Why does every ISP, office space provider, et al, talk only about bandwidth and never about latency?
For a lot of what I do, latency matters just as much and often more. I think that’s true for most people, too. But somehow latency has become The Metric That Dare Not Speak Its Name.
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Ben Cotton (he/him)replied to Karl Fogel last edited by
@kfogel two-part guess:
1. Because in the Internet 1.0 days, bandwidth mattered a lot more than latency. I'd argue that for non-tech folks, that's still the case. But definitely in the 90s and 00s. So we got used to talking bandwidth and it's hard to change habits.
2. Because people understand "big number good" more readily than they understand "small number good" -
Berkubernetusreplied to Ben Cotton (he/him) last edited by
@funnelfiasco @kfogel AlsoL
3. The providers themselves don't have good stats on latency, and they don't want to collect them.
4. If they did collect them, those stats would be pretty bad, so they don't want to publish.
I'll point out that it's pretty rare for an ISP to even publish figures on upload bandwidth, and when they do it's often wrong. I sure wouldn't trust any latency figures from them.
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Ben Cotton (he/him)replied to Berkubernetus last edited by
@fuzzychef @kfogel that's one thing I like about my ISP: I pay for 500mbps symmetric and I get 500+ mbps symmetric
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Scott Williams 🐧replied to Ben Cotton (he/him) last edited by
@funnelfiasco @fuzzychef @kfogel It's incredible how jealous I am of you for this. I bet your ISP doesn't block port 80 outbound or does data caps either, does it? My goodness do I despise Cox Cable.
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Ben Cotton (he/him)replied to Scott Williams 🐧 last edited by
@vwbusguy they don't! I just have to pay a few bucks a month to avoid CGNAT
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Scott Williams 🐧replied to Ben Cotton (he/him) last edited by
@funnelfiasco That's amazing