Latency, jitter & speed

Jitter

The people have all queued up nicely, waited their turn to get on the buses, if their bus arrives out of order they're not happy, in the same way you'd be unhappy if Netflix started showing you the next scene before you'd seen the last, this is jitter.

Latency / Lag

Latency or lag is well known among gamers, its how long a packet takes to get from A to B, this is in part limited by physics, if you're communicating with the other side of the world, its going be take a 100's of milliseconds, but you shouldn't be more than 20 milliseconds from London (the heart of UK Internet), if your bus isn't taking the correct path, the roads are to busy and your passengers won't be happy.

Loss

Loss is the biggest problem, some protocols can cope with loss, but normally anything more than 1% and you'll have problems. When buses disappear, people ask questions.

Speed

Speed is the first consideration people make when choosing a broadband provider, but how important is it really? Imagine speeds are lanes on your motorway, more lanes means more buses and cars can overtake.

A typical netflix/ stream is going to be 3-4Mb, online gaming doesn't take much bandwidth at all (less than 1Mb) so its only when you're doing updates or downloading new software that speed becomes an issue.

With gigabit broadband connections becoming available content providers often limit you to 200-300Mb/s; so arguably anything north of this doesn't mean you can do anything faster, any more than a Lamborghini goes more than 70mph on the motorway. If you try those dreaded updates when someone else is watching Netflix, even 30Mb/s won't upset Netflix, just means it'll take a few more minutes for your download to complete.

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