Six things to demand from your Internet Service Provider
In the world of Internet service advertising, we’re perpetually bombarded with ads that, above all, extol the “virtues of a faster Internet experience”. Don’t fall into the trap — here are six aspects you should evaluate beyond the “numbers” in your current or future Internet contract:
- Real speed
- Guaranteed bandwidth
- Unfiltered, unthrottled service
- Reliability and quality of service
- Access from the outside world
- Privacy, neutrality and censorship
Each and every one of these aspects can make or break the honeymoon with your ISP. Each matter independently, and once you’ve done a little research on what your ISP of choice is doing to grant (or deny) them to you, you’ll be in a position to make a much more informed decision.
Bandwidth is not speed. Latency is.
If you are anything like the next person, by now you’ve been led to believe that your Internet experience is determined by bandwidth. That’s bullshit. Bandwidth is hoy many bytes you can download per second — and nothing more.
Anything above 500 kbits per second guarantees enough speed to make Web surfing snappy — if, and only if, the latency of your connection is low enough. Becaus, you see, latency is key — it’s the time your computer takes to initially communications with Web (or other types of Internet) servers.
What happens when you click on a link
After you click on a hyperlink, your Web browser (more or less) goes through the following steps:
- It connects your computer to a Web server and requests a Web page.
- It receives the response, starts processing it and (in parallel) starts other requests — to get the images, videos, styles and scripts that actually form the page. But only four of those at a time.
If each of those steps can be started in, say, 50 milliseconds, you’re golden — the page more or less snaps in front of your eyes. But if they take over a second each… well, let’s say you have a problem because, for the average Web page, you will never see it settle down before ten or so seconds since your last click.
What happens when you play games over the Internet
Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re playing Unreal Tournament, or any other fast-paced first person shooter kinda game. Just blink once — boom, you’re dead. That’s how long it takes for someone to shoot your neck and rip your head off.
A blink of an eye is, literally, 25 milliseconds. Not a problem for wireless or wired local networks — because the bullets traveling through the network take less than two milliseconds to get eaten by your enemies. But if you’re gaming through an Internet connection and your enemy is sitting just 200 milliseconds “away”, you’re going to have real trouble making any kills.
Sure, modern games incorporate mechanisms that attempt to compensate for that latency problem. But they only go so far.
What determines latency
Latency is determined by two factors:
- The physical distance of the route that information takes through the Internet. Not a really big hurdle, since information travels at a rather close factor to the speed of light.
- The time each “hop” (Internet router) takes to process and forward that information to the next hop.
You can verify this yourself. Open a command line (cmd.exe on Windows, konsole or gnome-terminal on Linux) and type (on Windows) tracert google.com (on Linux, substitute tracert for traceroute). You’ll see a table grow: each row is a hop, and the three columns on the right side are the times, in milliseconds, that information took to reach that hop. The last row will contain the final destination’s latency measurement. You can substitute google.com for your favorite Web site’s address or your gaming friend’s IP address.
So latency is key — now you know that. Next up: how much bandwidth you’re really getting?