Reply To: Latency issues
Dear Billy,
Thank you for sharing the fast.com results from you and your colleague, your internet providers (Cox in Arizona and Frontier for you in Connecticut), and that fiber isn’t currently available for your colleague. I recommend that your colleague upgrade to a business cable connection with at least 50 Mbit/s of upload speed (if 35 Mbit/s of upload speed is all that’s available for a business plan, that’s fine). If business cable isn’t available or is prohibitively expensive, they should check whether a cable plan with higher upload speed is available.
Upgrading your colleague’s connection to a good business cable connection might bring the latency from them to you down from the upper 40s to around 40 or maybe into the upper 30s. This is about the best that’s possible between your two distant locations.
Speed and latency are different. Your colleague already has plenty of upload speed (110 Mbit/s), but they might still get lower latency by switching to a plan with more upload speed or, preferably, a business cable plan because, either way, the internet provider might give your colleague’s network traffic more priority. Cable suffers from traffic congestion when lots of neighbors use the internet at the same time. A friend of mine doesn’t have access to fiber and so uses business cable, which seems to get rid of most of the connectivity disadvantages of cable compared to fiber.
In the fast.com results below, the noticeably higher latencies for your colleague in Arizona compared to your latencies in Connecticut are typical when comparing cable and fiber connections.
fast.com results for colleague in AZ
Download: 1.1 Gbps
Upload: 110 Mbps
Unloaded latency: 13 ms
Loaded latency: 26 ms
Client: [City in AZ] [IP Address] Cox
Server(s) Tempe, US | Los Angeles, US
fast.com results for Billy in Connecticut
Download: 1.1 Gbps
Upload: 1.0 Gbps
Unloaded latency: 6 ms
Loaded latency: 13 ms
Client: [City in CT] [IP Address] Frontier
Server(s) Secaucus, US | Ashburn, US
Thank you,
David Liao
