Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Except in some specific cases (like when your job is to regularly download and upload huge files) latency is even more important than bandwidth. Even fairly low bandwidth under 10 Mbps is enough for the majority of real-life office job cases and it feels this way if the latency and jitter are low yet high latency/jitter can make even a 100+ Mbps connection unbearable. It's low latency that makes Internet feel fast. ISPs should advertise latency and jitter levels alongside bandwidth and that's the most important numbers customers should look at.

I usually explain this to non-techies by inviting them to imagine they own a train full of 1TB drives. This way they can move a million terabytes to a neighbor town in an hour. Naïvely this translates to 277.8 Tbps which seems super fast but there is a catch :-)




I admittedly don't have multiple (or even one) 4K video streams coming into my house at a time. But a lot of people obsess about 1+ gigabit bandwidth availability when nothing even approaching that matters to most people. Low/predictable latency and just reliability matters far more in general.


+10!




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: