Many DSL advertising focus on the bandwidht you can have to “make the web faster” . If for large file it is true that bandwith matter an under estimate criteria is the latency (also known as Lag). For interactive service such as VOIP (Skype, Msn…) and online game, It is the criteria to look for.
If you have try to play CounterStrike or make a e-call with a high latency you know what I mean. For the other there is a
perceivable delay between your action and the result. Getting more bandwith is easy, if you really needed it you can get an other line and loadbalance. For the latency there nothing you can do. That is probably why there is no advertising on it.
A really good article about it is It’s the Latency, Stupid. by S. Cheshire a Apple protocol expert. Even if the article get back to 2001 it still remains accurate.
In particular the idea that modem perform poorly is still so true. Latency is may be the key argument to deploy optic fiber as it will allow to reduce the latency drasticly. We can hope to have a latency around twice the speed of light in fiber which is 200 x 10^6 m/s. This will allow a new range of application that need reactivity such as controling remotely a car or improving Internet Call.
That is why the French operator Free intiative to deploy optic fiber, is a good idea to improve quality of service.
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