Fibre latency question

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funkychicken

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I have a uncapped 10mbps Telkom ftth line via Ispafrika. New installation in Welgelegen area in Cpt northern suburbs. When doing a local speed test ping is at 4ms. When gaming on a Jhb battlefield server, ping is at 22 to 25ms. During gaming, when other members of the family is on the Internet, the ping spikes to 60 ms and sometimes even above 100.

My understanding of fibre was that multiple users would have little or no effect on my ping and that the bottleneck would be with the upload and download speed only. If the line suffered because of the number of users one would simply then move to a 20 or 40 mbps line to alleviate the problem. Is my understanding wrong and would the number of users at any given time affect the latency irrespective of the line speed?

So by paying for more speed the latency will not improve? Will appreciate your comments
 
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If the issue is that your line is being bottle-necked, yes, upgrading it would solve the issue.
You're using Telkom FTTH, so sign up for a 1GB account from another provider to test and see if the issue persists/goes away in order to rule out your ISP.
 
koeksGHT said:
Quality of service. Just search QoS and router you have for info.
Click to expand...

So this is something that will prioritise my enjoyment of the Internet above other users? Seems like I am then not really solving the underlying problem.
 
Most modern routers prioritise low packet loss over low latency in their default config. Any time that the line is running at capacity - one of these two will suffer.

You either need a faster line or to restrict some of the traffic to prevent you from maxing out the line (QoS)
 
ambo said:
Most modern routers prioritise low packet loss over low latency in their default config. Any time that the line is running at capacity - one of these two will suffer.

You either need a faster line or to restrict some of the traffic to prevent you from maxing out the line (QoS)
Click to expand...

Understood. So just to clarify specifically around the latency issue: increasing the linespeed will lessen the impact on latency by multiple users?

Another question on latency then: from what i can gather from comments in this forum, there seems to be a difference in the quality of fibre between diffrent service providers? Telkom ftth could potentially give a higher latency result than for instance Dark Fibre? Would this explain why i am getting 22 to 26ms ping to Jhb but someone else will get 5 to 6ms?
 
funkychicken said:
Understood. So just to clarify specifically around the latency issue: increasing the linespeed will lessen the impact on latency by multiple users?

Another question on latency then: from what i can gather from comments in this forum, there seems to be a difference in the quality of fibre between diffrent service providers? Telkom ftth could potentially give a higher latency result than for instance Dark Fibre? Would this explain why i am getting 22 to 26ms ping to Jhb but someone else will get 5 to 6ms?
Click to expand...

Not really, Telkom use PON so if it's oversubscribed you could possibly be contended, but realistically it would be silly for Telkom to do so. It's also fairly new so the market isn't very saturated from an update perspective, as yet.

Latency via national fibre between CT and JHB is around 20ms, so there is no better latency than that. The lower latency results you are seeing is within your municipality kind of thing.
 
PBCool said:
Not really, Telkom use PON so if it's oversubscribed you could possibly be contended, but realistically it would be silly for Telkom to do so. It's also fairly new so the market isn't very saturated from an update perspective, as yet.

Latency via national fibre between CT and JHB is around 20ms, so there is no better latency than that. The lower latency results you are seeing is within your municipality kind of thing.
Click to expand...

Don't forget Telkom fibre goes via IPC. That adds latency as well.
 
Sinbad said:
Don't forget Telkom fibre goes via IPC. That adds latency as well.
Click to expand...
Only if the provider is saturating their capacity really, the overhead is negligible otherwise.
 
PBCool said:
Not really, Telkom use PON so if it's oversubscribed you could possibly be contended, but realistically it would be silly for Telkom to do so. It's also fairly new so the market isn't very saturated from an update perspective, as yet.

Latency via national fibre between CT and JHB is around 20ms, so there is no better latency than that. The lower latency results you are seeing is within your municipality kind of thing.
Click to expand...

So if i am on battlefield Jhb server with say 22ms ping and someone else in the house for instance is watching a twitch game feed, it would be normal for my ping to fluctuate and jump to 100 to 150ms? Even saw it go up to 200ms just now. Nobody else in the household was doing anything else on the internet.

I honestly thought that this would not happen with fibre?

Sorry to ask again but i am still confused. Would my latency improve by upping the line speed?
 
Because the person watching twitch requests a big chunk of data and while its coming down your small 10mb pipe your game data has to wait behind it briefly.

At 10mb any video the starts playing or buffers a bit can pretty much hog the whole line for a second, and these days someone scrolling down FB might go past any of those auto play vids and then you'll lag.

20Mb is probably a much better point.

Try the QOS thing, some routers make it easy
 
funkychicken said:
So if i am on battlefield Jhb server with say 22ms ping and someone else in the house for instance is watching a twitch game feed, it would be normal for my ping to fluctuate and jump to 100 to 150ms? Even saw it go up to 200ms just now. Nobody else in the household was doing anything else on the internet.

I honestly thought that this would not happen with fibre?

Sorry to ask again but i am still confused. Would my latency improve by upping the line speed?
Click to expand...

Yeah man, on 10mb your experience will only suffer if someone else in the house starts watching a Twitch stream / Youtube etc seeing that they're pulling far more bandwidth than you while playing BF.

Rather upgrade to 20mb at minimum, you'll definitely have better performance overall especially if more than 2 people are pulling data over your connection at the same time :)
 
funkychicken said:
So if i am on battlefield Jhb server with say 22ms ping and someone else in the house for instance is watching a twitch game feed, it would be normal for my ping to fluctuate and jump to 100 to 150ms? Even saw it go up to 200ms just now. Nobody else in the household was doing anything else on the internet.

I honestly thought that this would not happen with fibre?

Sorry to ask again but i am still confused. Would my latency improve by upping the line speed?
Click to expand...


Maybe, maybe not. Others have suggested getting a test account from another ISP to see if your ISP is causing the problem and not your connection to the network.

It depends on many things .....


The only way to make the situation better without increasing the service rate is to use QoS to prioritise certain traffic types. If you want to allow others not to be affected, you need to up the size of the pipe available, BUT.....

That may not solve the problem IF your ISP is running some of his links at maximum capacity (as others have already said just about all of them do saturate their networks). There is only possibly one exception (CW). There is one other network that is unlimited because it is deliberately run at 25 - 30% capacity, but that network is not available for public use. How I miss my 10GE FSO system link to that network

ALL that fibre promises is that it is possible to provide virtually unlimited capacity which other media (copper and radio) cannot do.
The only limitation is the chosen fibre technology (AON, EPON, GPON, ME, etc). The latency one- way on fibre is dependent on distance. The RTT is double the one way latency. So a link from JHB to CT will show slower or larger ping times than a local connection in CT. The value is about 5 μsec per km. Add to that equipment latency and you can calculate what the latency/RTT values should be for any given link. To that you have to add equipment latency and local network latency as well.

Then the effect of congestion and or contention has to allowed for. And don't forget the effects of your PCs Operating System and its settings, processors, HDD write speeds, memory etc.

Still confused? Join the club ...... ;)
 
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Easier option is to create multiple SSID and allocated the bandwidth per SSID. but 10mbps is a small pipe if that is what you are currently using
 
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