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by sascha_sl 1357 days ago
Bandwidth isn't that important with game streaming after ~40-70 Mbps, latency and jitter (essentially latency consistency) is.
2 comments

Consumer-grade Wi-Fi is also a major problem when it comes to latency & jitter. It doesn't even have to be game streaming, any real-time application such as calls suffer from it as well, despite not actually requiring much bandwidth at all.

Unfortunately there is no user-friendly tool to test for this. Most tests focus purely on speed, which can be tricked by various packet-loss-compensation algorithms, so you can score a "perfect" 1Gbps speedtest despite the connection cutting completely for a second.

speedtest.net used to have a sibling "pingtest" site that measured your jitter. I'm not sure why they don't exist anymore.
I remember it using a Java applet. I think the reason none of the online test sites support it is because it’s hard to test latency & jitter in the browser as the lower layers try hard to compensate for it.
Oh. It was Flash.

Sometimes I forget that was ever a thing!

Speedtest for random server (servers listed on Ookla is quite random) is useful but ping for random server is a bit useless. Just ping for targeted server that runs service you use.
I'm somewhat surprised the 4 sibling comments as of this writing don't even mention the latency/jitter issue-- to me, that's always been one of the obvious biggest flaws with game streaming. Your average consumer has little to no awareness of it, it's beyond Google's control, and it has a very noticeable impact to anyone experiencing it. Not a good combination.

Edit: Nextgrid showed up as I was typing this and set the record straight. My faith in HN is restored.