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Ask HN: What is the worst latency currently suffered on the Internet?

7 points by jmbwell ↗ HN
I’m curious: who uses the Internet with the highest real-world minimum latency, where are they, and how are they connected?

It looks like most continents with fiber links of some kind have latency to other hosts around the world of less than about 500ms. I imagine remote locations like McMurdo Station served only by satellites have much higher latency. I’ve heard of military stations in Alaska served by a chain of terrestrial wireless relays that have terrible latency. I wonder whether that’s as bad as it gets, and how bad it really is in day-to-day usage. Mostly I’d love to see some actual numbers.

Is satellite pretty much the worst? Is there anyone using some kind of maritime VHF link that’s even worse?

Happy to consider high rate/high latency links as well as low rate links e.g. 9600 or 1200 baud for like remote SCADA where applicable.

Who has literally the worst Internet latency?

9 comments

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toast0
Wikipedia says "Bouncing a signal off a geosynchronous satellite takes about a quarter of a second" [1], if you do that both ways, that's half a second round trip. If your peer is also on satellite, there's one second round trip, plus whatever the round trip time is between the two teleports.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_delay

jmbwell
Right, so I guess I’m wondering, out in the real world, who has an example of this and other factors contributing to excessive latency?

Are there people dealing with multiple-second latency daily? What are some example latency figures?

toast0
You could get half-second latency for only $50/month! https://www.hughesnet.com/ Act now, and you'll also get a tiny bandwidth allotment!

Hughes provides services in other countries too, and other services exist. If you're out in the sticks with no terrestrial wired broadband, no terrestrial wireless broadband, it's this, Starlink, or Iridium. If you're communicating with someone else in a similar situation, yeah, you're looking > 1 s; especially if they're on another continent. Voice conferencing will be very painful.

sacrosanct
Remote areas like the rural countryside can benefit greatly from novel tech like 5G. Rural areas are notoriously a lot less connected than urban areas, for obvious reasons, and typically rely on a patchwork of repeater routers all coming from a single 3G/4G mobile router, and shared with multiple neighbors.
jmbwell
Ah yes, another good example. 5G home internet and long-range rural WISPs would also be interesting.

I imagine some of the rural providers would hesitate to post any real-world numbers, but maybe someone here is a customer who won't mind sharing…

akasakahakada
Using amazon.com after download limit without adblock be like 7mins latency. I just ate my meal and wait for images to pop up.
h2odragon
I just got fiber (finally!) yesterday. My side by side speedtest with viasat showed the satellite link ping times at 651 to 1143 ms.

by comparison, the fiber connection is 45ms.

It's incredible how much stuff on the modern web utterly fails with that kind of latency. Every "framework library" 200 byte xfer builds the chance that something wont load and the rest will crash. Not to mention the ISP's charming habit of picking random connections to either hijack for their "your bandwidth has run out but you can pay us to get unthrottled" message, or their random RST injection into streams (how they implement the throttles).

back when, long distance low rate audio modems rarely got worse than 200ms, as far as i recall. Packet network forwarders could make that much worse.

jmbwell
Thank you — very much the kind of info I was hoping for.

You’re touching on one of the reasons I was asking. Modern usage relies on lots of round trip connections that are bound to make a number of applications unusable. And yet people use them.

Seems like maybe more people are on that sort of connection than designers might realize.

Anyway thanks, and congrats on your fiber!

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