[cortesoft]

Latency to where? Latency is not a metric that applies to a single connection, it can only be measure when you have two systems that communicate to each other. 5ms to your router doesn't matter if everything you are connecting to is 500ms away from that.

The best internet in the world, located in a major city, will have around 15ms latency to the closest datacenter. Wireless solutions can easily achieve that.

[lotsofpulp]

I have a fiber circuit for one of my businesses that has sub 10ms and sub 5ms latency to most large websites. I understand that certain latencies are not possible for every point to every point, but I’m using it as a proxy for the quality of the connection. Easiest way for me to discern the quality of my internet connection is to check the latency. All of my good fiber circuits are extremely low latency, and all of the terrible residential cable company connections split between 1,000 homes have terrible high latency (and upload bandwidth).

[cortesoft]

You must be very close to a large datacenter that houses the CDNs used by those large websites if you are seeing sub 5ms latency.

For any of the users we are talking about (underserved populations in areas without fiber internet), they will never see those latencies even with the same fiber you have.

If you live in rural Wyoming, there are going to be practically zero services hosted within 500 miles of you. You are not going to get 5ms latency no matter what you do.

[lotsofpulp]

Yes, I’m in a major population center. But whatever the case, a symmetric fiber connection would be a solid improvement over the nonsense coaxial situation we have now.

[cortesoft]

I guess, but my point is that for many people in rural and underserved locations, they won't notice any performance difference between fiber and a coaxial connection, for example.

Insisting that EVERYONE has to get fiber, even when that won't change their performance experience, only slows down the actual service of their needs.

This is like any sort of performance engineering problem; focusing on an area that is no where close to becoming the bottleneck is not an efficient use of resources.

[lotsofpulp]

As far as I know, the only way to get decent upload bandwidth is via fiber.