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My comments were relative to latency. Bandwidth and loss are different issues. That was about all the detail I could stand typing on my phone
Depending on the application, users can be concerned with one aspect more than the others.
Maybe trivial to some, but Financial trading markets can be very focused on minimizing latency as trading profits can be very time sensitive. That can sometimes run counter to the normal network design criteria.
But the point was that, as a general rule, I think many folks (not RDUBiker) often believe that shorter pings and higher bandwidths work hand in hand because we use words like "faster". Indeed, higher bandwidth may drive a faster screen refresh but it doesn't drive faster ping times.
Another trivia point - some of the first optical fiber telecom systems in the US were designed in Raleigh including the first singlemode US system to carry live customer traffic in the US - can you imagine 90Mbps! . A fair amount of early WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) work was also done in Raleigh ... all in the '82-'84 timeframe ... and the first optical self healing "rings" were also designed in this area. ATT/Bell Labs gets lots of deserved credit, but a couple of Triangle companies played a significant role too.
Extreme still running 35/6 up/down here ... pretty consistently.
Frank
I still think that you are sending out a slightly confusing message regarding network speed. For example, I have 20 Mbps Earthlink service. If I view a traffic graph of the interface connected to my cable modem, I can see the link max-out for brief periods when I'm streaming HD content to multiple devices, and simultaneously see ping response times increase a bit. This is the first kind of latency that people should want to reduce/eliminate, and these higher bandwidth connections are the solution.
Once the bandwidth bottleneck at the home is removed, people should start taking a closer look at latency differences between providers, as well as peering links, and I actually think that gigabit broadband will expose a lot of these weaknesses in service provider backbones.
I just wouldn't ever want to downplay the benefits of having lots of bandwidth at the home. People should want these faster speeds even if there are some latency issues to start out with.
I still think that you are sending out a slightly confusing message regarding network speed. For example, I have 20 Mbps Earthlink service. If I view a traffic graph of the interface connected to my cable modem, I can see the link max-out for brief periods when I'm streaming HD content to multiple devices, and simultaneously see ping response times increase a bit. This is the first kind of latency that people should want to reduce/eliminate, and these higher bandwidth connections are the solution.
-------- Normal network behavior here - the network gets congested (maxed out) so latency (delay) increases. Four Netflix HD streams could certainly get close to your Earthlink service limit.
Once the bandwidth bottleneck at the home is removed, people should start taking a closer look at latency differences between providers, as well as peering links, and I actually think that gigabit broadband will expose a lot of these weaknesses in service provider backbones.
-------- I'd worry more about the backbone bandwidth capabilities if I thought I needed those speeds. For example, commercial providers typically provide Service Level Agreements for latency, throughput, availability, time to restore and other metrics because they can be important depending on the application. As an example, a satellite link of any bandwidth will provide enough latency (propagation delay) that simple voice interactions become stilted. Other apps that are not real time dependent will suffer much less. So will a fiber based 1 Gig connection with a 35 millisecond ping work appreciably worse than a 1 Gig fiber connection with a 60 millisecond ping? It depends on the application. A few might, but I'm not worried.
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I just wouldn't ever want to downplay the benefits of having lots of bandwidth at the home. People should want these faster speeds even if there are some latency issues to start out with.
------ It depends. We upgraded from Standard to Extreme via the latest TW promotion. Speedtest confirms that my bandwidth essentially doubled. To be honest, as I expected, my "experience" hasn't really changed with the upgrade. My wife and I work at home (she moves fairly large CAD files, I type trivia on City Data), we have TW phone and stream HD files via Netflix (which is obviously the only real test we provide). Now if we streamed multiple HD videos at the same time - then the extra bandwidth would be helpful as you can see on your network. I don't doubt some folks will benefit from a Gig connection, but I won't in my existing habits.
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Normal network behavior here - the network gets congested (maxed out) so latency (delay) increases. Four Netflix HD streams could certainly get close to your Earthlink service limit.
When I start a single Netflix HD stream, all of my downstream bandwidth is consumed for several seconds during buffering. See attached graph:
At the same time, I see latency increase by around 100ms. See attached ping output:
As the streaming continues, I see brief spikes in downstream bandwidth with corresponding latency spikes. The intermittent latency increases with multiple HD streams.
You probably experience the same thing and just don't notice, but brief slowdowns are actually occurring. Faster broadband connections will reduce this routine latency that most people don't know how to identify.
just rebooted and still getting 37/6 on 30/5 plan in Apex near beaver creek.
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