ADSL/56K Ping times

Hi all,

I remember to have read somewhere some time ago that packet latency doesn't rise very much compared to bandwidth when comparing a 56K modem to a ADSL modem. I also believe it was said that beyond a certain ADSL speed, latency does no longer improve.

Has any of you encountered any info which confirms I indeed remember correctly?

Thanks,

There should be a vast improvement with your latency from 56k to any form of ADSL.
Even a slow 250kb/s ADSL service should give you low latency in games and to sites.
All ADSL services have at least a rate adaptive 250kb/s upstream, which alone is far superior to the upstream speed on 56k.

As for comparing latency between ADSL services/speeds, a fixed 512k down/256k up ADSL service and a 2mb down/256kb up service that were, for example, on the same ISP and exchange, should have very similar ping times, as its the upstream that counts, and then after that its down to how short and quick the route is from your router, to your ISP and then to the server at the other end.

Edited by deleted (Mon 11-Sep-06 21:18:14)

The latency with a modem was caused by having to turn the data into analogue and back again, MODulate and DEModulate...

When us gamers had ISDN we probably had some of the lowest latency ever, including ADSL. I never had worse than 20ms and regularly had 15ms in a dos box. That was with just 64kbps.

ADSL does not improve on this, despite going from 512kbs>1mb>4mb my latency is unchanged, 20ms to servers in the UK.

It depends on the amount of data being sent though, if you application or game uses less than your total available bandwidth then you won't see a gain.

You see a big difference between hardware, so if you want to drop latency try a different router.

Edited by deleted (Tue 12-Sep-06 11:18:08)