Does more bandwidth equal less lag?

[AnnHerrick]

Lag being quite unpopular in SL and no favorite of mine either I thought perhaps I could reduce it by getting a faster internet connection. Currently internet speed tests on my connection show me 7.2 mbps plus or minus depending on the time of day. I have CenturyLink and they seem resistant to changing that and giving me a faster connection, so I thought to look to Comcast/Xfinity, which offers many speeds up to gigabit, but they also say their speeds are not guaranteed. That's not encouraging, but I'm sure they can do better than 7.2 mbps.

But will it help me in SL? Might I be able to go to Fogbound and not see everyone's parts flying around for the first few minutes? Will sims rez faster? Will motion be smoother? I'm interested in the experiences of others in the matter. I don't want to go to the bother of switching providers only to gain nothing in SL.

 

Thanks,

Ann

Edited November 13, 2019 by AnnHerrick
spelling

[Fritigern Gothly]

I am on Comcast/Xfinity on a plan which is supposed to give me up to 250mb/s, but according to fast.com I get between 80 and 125, which is still not too shabby.

I'm not complaining, I am sharing this internet with 2 other users, plus their mobile devices (including tablet), a smart TV and another computer which streams movies and shows for my 5 and 3 year olds. Often all at the same time.

As for reducing lag in SL, or, better worded, increasing responsiveness of SL, it does not do all that much. Yes, rezzing CAN be fast, but I still get moments when the rezzing of textures simply stops for a few minutes while I am still connected. Your 7mb/s is probably a bit on the low end, I think that a plan with higher speeds may help at least a little for you. 

I still think that the speeds I get are good value for the 75 USD I pay per month for that, so I am not complaining at all. You will just have to figure out for yourself if Comcast's rates (speed and cost) are good value in your book as well.

 

P.S. We are on internet only, without telephony or TV. This was a conscious decision on our part. 250mb/s plans which include phone and/or TV will obviously cost more than 75 USD.

 

Edited November 14, 2019 by Fritigern Gothly
added screenshot of my speed test

[Richardus Raymaker]

6 hours ago, Fritigern Gothly said:

I am on Comcast/Xfinity on a plan which is supposed to give me up to 250mb/s, but according to fast.com I get between 80 and 125, which is still not too shabby.

 

.Does your network card support 1Gb speed ? (1000Mb) the speed you tell 80-125mb let me think your connection to your system is set to 100Mbit.

[Mollymews]

1 hour ago, Richardus Raymaker said:

.Does your network card support 1Gb speed ? (1000Mb) the speed you tell 80-125mb let me think your connection to your system is set to 100Mbit.

^^ this

if you have a 10/100 or 100/100 network adapter card then look at upgrading your network adapter to 1GB if you can

[Fritigern Gothly]

9 hours ago, Richardus Raymaker said:

.Does your network card support 1Gb speed ? (1000Mb) the speed you tell 80-125mb let me think your connection to your system is set to 100Mbit.

 

8 hours ago, Mollymews said:

^^ this

if you have a 10/100 or 100/100 network adapter card then look at upgrading your network adapter to 1GB if you can

 

I checked and my network card is indeed "only" a 100mbit card, which does meet my needs well enough.
Granted, I do not get the 250MB/s that it potentially could reach, but I am content with the speeds that I do get.

P.S. My first network card was a 10-base T card. Look it up if that does not ring a bell  

P.P.S. I still remember using dial-up modems. My first modem was a 2400 baud modem, followed by a 14k4 and finally 54k modem on which I would get 5.5 KB/s at best, followed by my first cable modem which gave me a lightning fast 500Kb/s. So with that in mind, it's easy to be content with the speeds that I get.  

Edited November 14, 2019 by Fritigern Gothly

[Mollymews]

8 hours ago, Fritigern Gothly said:

I checked and my network card is indeed "only" a 100mbit card, which does meet my needs well enough.
Granted, I do not get the 250MB/s that it potentially could reach, but I am content with the speeds that I do get.

yes agree, if what speed we do go at works for us then is good enough

I find 10/50 plenty good enough for what I do. Good enough in the sense that before the fibre came down my street I could only get ADSL2 on copper telephone wire.  So going to 10/50 fibre was quantums for me

a thing about switching up to a faster broadband plan is that before we do this then best to look at our computer hardware and see if we are getting maximum gain from it when matched against our current ISP plan. When our computer is not getting maximum gain from what we do get from our ISP on our current plan then switching to a faster ISP plan isn't going to make our computer run any faster

 

Edited November 15, 2019 by Mollymews
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[Pussycat Catnap]

On 11/13/2019 at 11:29 AM, AnnHerrick said:

Lag being quite unpopular in SL and no favorite of mine either I thought perhaps I could reduce it by getting a faster internet connection. Currently internet speed tests on my connection show me 7.2 mbps plus or minus depending on the time of day. I have CenturyLink and they seem resistant to changing that and giving me a faster connection, so I thought to look to Comcast/Xfinity, which offers many speeds up to gigabit, but they also say their speeds are not guaranteed. That's not encouraging, but I'm sure they can do better than 7.2 mbps.

I've got, I think, 500mbps with xfinity.

7.2 mbps was normal in the US 10 years ago... back when Asia was considering 200-300mbps slow.

At 7.2... can you even browse the modern web? Does something like Netflix work for you?

 

There's a bandwidth setting in the SL viewer which is NOT the same as your Internet speed... but the thread title at first made me think that was the question here... because the answer is the opposite for each of them.

Dialing up the setting in the viewer 'chokes' your connection... Like clogging an artery. Adding more down AND up speed to your internet is getting a wider artery...

 

At 7.2 you're trying to run your body off of a blood vessel the size of the one a normal person uses to feed blood to their left pinky's fingernail...

You might as well break out a dial-up modem at that point...

 

Getting faster Internet is going to change everything for you... even the birds outside your window will chirp more clearly... Like... seriously... They should be paying YOU to make you suffer that speed... It's almost an 8th Amendment violation...

 

 

[Pussycat Catnap]

On 11/13/2019 at 6:42 PM, Fritigern Gothly said:

I am on Comcast/Xfinity on a plan which is supposed to give me up to 250mb/s, but according to fast.com I get between 80 and 125, which is still not too shabby.

So a trick about Comcast...

They rent users a modem... Maybe $5-$15/month depending on how much they hate you...

It usually CAPS OUT at 100-200mps, or... half of what you're buying... whichever is worse...

It's basically a scam to sell people more than they can actually use...

 

Like going to a gas station and pumping 10 gallons of gas, then driving off after only getting 5... but you still bought 10... the station can then give that other 5 to the next sucker, and make double profit. Especially because unlike the average car driver... most people don't know how to check how much they're getting and why it might not be what they ordered...

 

You can buy a modem at a local Best Buy or Amazon for... $45-$100... that will cap out at twice what you're Internet delivers...

 

That won't solve everything though...

Comcast has another trick. Guaranteed speed vs rated speeds... Business customers buy guaranteed speed. If they buy 30mbps, they get EXACTLY that all the time. If a customer buys 300mpbs... they get 'UP TO 300mbps... as divided up between everyone on the same neighborhood splitter as them'...

 

So basically Comcast sells you twice what the modem they rent you can handle, then splits what they actually deliver between you and your neighbors, and most people don't know how to tell this is happening, and there's not much competition, so they get away with it...

Visit Asia sometime where a person in a back alley ghetto apartment with only 3 walls gets 500-1000mbps guaranteed and you'll realize why the USA seems to be backsliding...

 

[Aethelwine]

My Internet connection times to about 2Mbs with a 128Kbs upload speed. Whilst I am sure faster Internet would improve things it is sufficient for sailing, driving around mainland watching video in a browser. Where I have problems more than others is group rides on motorbiking sims. It is probably partly the Internet connection, but my GTX 745 won't be helping either. 

[AnnHerrick]

11 hours ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

I've got, I think, 500mbps with xfinity.

7.2 mbps was normal in the US 10 years ago... back when Asia was considering 200-300mbps slow.

At 7.2... can you even browse the modern web? Does something like Netflix work for you?

Getting faster Internet is going to change everything for you... even the birds outside your window will chirp more clearly... Like... seriously... They should be paying YOU to make you suffer that speed... It's almost an 8th Amendment violation...

 

 

Well yes I can browse the internet, and Netflix did work for me before I cancelled it, and I'm sure getting more bandwidth is going to help with lag in SL now. Thing is that Comcast would seem to be the most hated company in America after Monsanto, and for reasons we are all well aware of.  I'm taking it for granted that if I order 200mbps from them I might get 100, or less, but it will still be a huge improvement over 7.2 mbps.

[AnnHerrick]

11 hours ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

So a trick about Comcast...

They rent users a modem... Maybe $5-$15/month depending on how much they hate you...

It usually CAPS OUT at 100-200mps, or... half of what you're buying... whichever is worse...

It's basically a scam to sell people more than they can actually use...

 

Like going to a gas station and pumping 10 gallons of gas, then driving off after only getting 5... but you still bought 10... the station can then give that other 5 to the next sucker, and make double profit. Especially because unlike the average car driver... most people don't know how to check how much they're getting and why it might not be what they ordered...

 

You can buy a modem at a local Best Buy or Amazon for... $45-$100... that will cap out at twice what you're Internet delivers...

 

That won't solve everything though...

Comcast has another trick. Guaranteed speed vs rated speeds... Business customers buy guaranteed speed. If they buy 30mbps, they get EXACTLY that all the time. If a customer buys 300mpbs... they get 'UP TO 300mbps... as divided up between everyone on the same neighborhood splitter as them'...

 

So basically Comcast sells you twice what the modem they rent you can handle, then splits what they actually deliver between you and your neighbors, and most people don't know how to tell this is happening, and there's not much competition, so they get away with it...

Visit Asia sometime where a person in a back alley ghetto apartment with only 3 walls gets 500-1000mbps guaranteed and you'll realize why the USA seems to be backsliding...

 

I called CenturyLink, they told me all I can get in my area is 10 mbps, and I told them that was not sufficient. Then tried to find a way to actually call Comcast, and their isn't any way to do that, they want you to schedule a call with them, they send you a code via text message and ask you to type it in, and when you do they tell you it doesn't match their records, every time. I tried this 8 times this morning. I guess they really don't want to talk to me unless I drive 22 miles to their store. I already hate them. Seems like they don't need or want my business already. They have pre-alienated me.

[Pussycat Catnap]

That's super weird.

In my area I can even go into a Comcast/xFinity store. But there's also the website. And then they further have sales people that follow you around if you go into Best Buy...

EDIT: I see you do have a store, but it's a tad bit of a distance.

If the website works, start there - the store is like an Apple Store; the 'experts' have the same training you get when you work at a Stop-N-Rob (7/11).

 

 

Edited November 15, 2019 by Pussycat Catnap

[AnnHerrick]

13 minutes ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

That's super weird.

In my area I can even go into a Comcast/xFinity store. But there's also the website. And then they further have sales people that follow you around if you go into Best Buy...

EDIT: I see you do have a store, but it's a tad bit of a distance.

If the website works, start there - the store is like an Apple Store; the 'experts' have the same training you get when you work at a Stop-N-Rob (7/11).

 

 

Well I finally did find a store of theirs I could call, and I got this really fast talking Indian guy on the phone who would not give me a direct answer to anything, and just dodged every question I asked him. Asked when I could schedule an installation he jerked me around saying it was a multi-step process and went into a diatribe about the steps, asked if I could get more than 10 mpbs he went on about how they do work for all the major companies, blah blah blah.... I could not get a direct and simple answer to anything from that guy so I hung up on him. There was so much noise in the background I could not hear him half the time anyway, and I'm thinking he was at call center in India, not the store here locally I meant to call. It's looking more and more like I'm just stuck with the internet service I have, and 7.2 mbps.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

Before we can should even begin to answer the original question, we need to know what kind of "lag" we're talking about.

Low framerate? Is your viewer looking like a choppy slideshow? No amount of bandwidth can fix that.

Delayed actions (assuming the Sim isn't lagging)? It takes half-a-second or more to move/jump? No amount of bandwidth can fix that. Bandwidth is literally the "width" of the lane that's bringing you data from the internet (i.e. how much you can receive at the same time), but it has no effect on "latency" aka the time it takes for one piece of data to be communicated.

Grey textures, mesh not appearing, animations not working? Yup! This is what more bandwidth can help with. Latency doesn't matter when you just want to download big chunks of data, like textures.

Edited November 15, 2019 by Wulfie Reanimator

[AnnHerrick]

1 hour ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Before we can should even begin to answer the original question, we need to know what kind of "lag" we're talking about.

Low framerate? Is your viewer looking like a choppy slideshow? No amount of bandwidth can fix that.

Delayed actions (assuming the Sim isn't lagging)? It takes half-a-second or more to move/jump? No amount of bandwidth can fix that. Bandwidth is literally the "width" of the lane that's bringing you data from the internet (i.e. how much you can receive at the same time), but it has no effect on "latency" aka the time it takes for one piece of data to be communicated.

Grey textures, mesh not appearing, animations not working? Yup! This is what more bandwidth can help with. Latency doesn't matter when you just want to download big chunks of data, like textures.

What kind of lag... Well let's start with the lag capital of SL, Fogbound. When I go there and walk inside nothing is rezzed and everyone's parts are flying around in the air for minutes after I get there, and I have to just wait up to ten minutes for it all to rez before I can see or do anything. When I go to a graphics intensive sim like Calas Galadhon Park it takes several minutes to rez completely. This morning I bought a helicopter and when I tried to fly it I crashed because I just could not control it with the bandwidth I have. Inputs produced unpredictable results that could not be compensated for, and crashola.

Then also is mesh not appearing, and seeing lots of people who's faces I cannot see and can only see their hair and brains, sometimes other skull parts like teeth. Not very appealing. I have the latest release of Firestorm, so it's not that. I do get lots of gray textures, where I should not as well. As for frame rate it varies greatly. Just standing in my house now it's between 8 and 15. It goes up and down depending on where I am and what I'm doing. Just TP'd to another sim and it went up to 35 then dropped back down to 6.5. I can't say my viewer ever looks like a choppy slide show other than when sims are taking a long time to rez. After they do it's all smooth.

 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

1 hour ago, AnnHerrick said:

What kind of lag... Well let's start with the lag capital of SL, Fogbound. When I go there and walk inside nothing is rezzed and everyone's parts are flying around in the air for minutes after I get there, and I have to just wait up to ten minutes for it all to rez before I can see or do anything.

I went there for a visit. The sim itself is in awful condition, a better connection isn't going to save you there.

1 hour ago, AnnHerrick said:

When I go to a graphics intensive sim like Calas Galadhon Park it takes several minutes to rez completely.

I went there too, it's actually less "graphically intensive" than Fogbound, based on the render info built into the viewer. It had less people, which is one big contributor for sure.

For reference (for everybody, even if these don't mean anything to you in particular), left is Fogbound, right is Galas Galadhon.

TLDR: Everything is worse in Fogbound, not to mention the Scripts Run % was around 5-10% compared to Galadhon's 90-100%

1 hour ago, AnnHerrick said:

This morning I bought a helicopter and when I tried to fly it I crashed because I just could not control it with the bandwidth I have. Inputs produced unpredictable results that could not be compensated for, and crashola.

This could be totally unrelated to your bandwidth. If the sim is struggling to run scripts, a good connection won't save you.

P.S. About the "7 mbps," are you sure it's not MBps (or MB/s)? As in, with a big B? Either way, I don't get more than about 1.3 mbps of bandwidth usage when teleporting to a new sim. 7 mbps should be more than enough to support that load, and then it's around 50-250 kbps (0.05 - 0.25 mbps) to keep things going after everything's loaded.

Edited November 15, 2019 by Wulfie Reanimator

[AnnHerrick]

Thank you Wulfie, that was a most informative post. I cannot say that I'm surprised that Fogbound is in bad shape as a sim. I just  could not determine that myself, but it makes sense. As for my internet speed, yes, it's mbps, by several speed tests online. I'm currently with CenturyLink, no contract so I can switch at any time, and I have an appointment with Comcast tomorrow. CenturyLink tells me they cannot provide any more speed than 10 mbps at my location and they only deliver 7.2, so for me they are obsolete. Comcast offers up to gigabit download speeds, but in my area? I'll find that out tomorrow. I intend to order 200 mbps in hopes of getting 100. At this point anything is better than CenturyLink.