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Comment by greyface- | Hacker News Reader

Latency to where? To your ISP's edge? To the nearest IXP? To Google, Cloudflare, Netflix, or AWS? To any destination on the Internet? Latency is an end-to-end metric which will almost always involve path components beyond the control of your ISP - can and should they be held responsible for those paths?

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Doesn't the same question appear with bandwidth? I don't care about my bandwidth to my router or the backbone, I care about my bandwidth to Google, Cloudflare, Netflix, etc.

Yep, it’s always an on network test I’ve seen letting the carrier claim promised speeds are met, never an off network test.

So the days of peopke begging to peer, by using cakes, will end?

Because backend fiscal for profit plays will be mandated second hat, over connectivity?

Bandwidth of the connection = bandwidth of the worst leg (which is usually between your house and the ISP).

Latency of the connection = sum of latency of every hop along the route.

So in practical terms your ISP directly controls your bandwidth, but latency is mostly out of their hands.

In practical terms, if you assume that the internet backbone at the ISP's peering node is not saturated, you can also assume that the latency from the peering node to your destination is constant.

> Latency to where?

To the closest Measuring Broadband America's measurement servers [1].

(They're currently "hosted by StackPath and were located in ten cities (often with multiple locations within each city) across the United States near a point of interconnection between the ISP’s network and the network on which the measurement server resides.")

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broad...

> The measurement servers used by the MBA program were hosted by StackPath and were located in ten cities (often with multiple locations within each city) across the United States near a point of interconnection between the ISP’s network and the network on which the measurement server resides.

I imagine StackPath is thrilled that this is the FCC's metric.

> imagine StackPath is thrilled that this is the FCC's metric

It was SamKnows until last August [1].

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/general/measuring-broadband-america

> Latency is an end-to-end metric which will almost always involve path components beyond the control of your ISP - can and should they be held responsible for those paths?

They could invest in peering and other arrangements that improve these paths.

yeah they ought to invest money on improving that instead of trying to have 5G or whatever is coming next.

Yes. But that's orthogonal to labeling requirements.

No it isn't. The fact that an ISP can make such an investment means that they should be held (at least partially) responsible for doing so.

Yes? Customers should definitely hold their suppliers responsible for features of the product the customers care about. But what does have to do with labeling requirements?

Eg patrons should hold restaurants accountable for the taste of the food, even (and especially because) taste is subjective. But that doesn't mean that we should try to shoehorn subjective taste into mandatory labeling requirements.

Customers literally can't, because ISPs are not a competitive market, and customers have no means to change that.

Hell, my current ISP is literally written into my lease agreement. If I could vote with my wallet, I would.

Well, that's a problem with your lease agreement. (I assume you are talking about the lease of your apartment?)

Even the most competitive market for ISPs couldn't fix your lease agreement.

In any case, the fix for not having a competitive market is not to pile on even more red tape that makes it harder for scrappy upstarts [0], but by removing barriers to entry.

I don't know too much about the US market for ISPs. But I do know that eg satellite internet doesn't get automatically approved: there's lot of red tape star link and others have to jump through. Cut that red tape, and also make it easier for foreign companies to become ISPs.

A read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_wireless_sp... also suggest significant extra red tape. Btw, a simple idea (inspired by that Wikipedia article) would be to make both TV stations and ISPs compete on equal footing in the auction: whoever bids most gets to use the spectrum as they please. Instead of deciding by administrative fiat which parts of the spectrum to use for broadcast TV and which for mobile broadband.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_auction#Goals says:

> "In designing auctions for spectrum licenses, the FCC is required by law to meet multiple goals and not focus simply on maximizing receipts. Those goals include ensuring efficient use of the spectrum, promoting economic opportunity and competition, avoiding excessive concentration of licenses, preventing the unjust enrichment of any party, and fostering the rapid deployment of new services, as well as recovering for the public a portion of the value of the spectrum."

In other words, politicians and bureaucrats reserved the rights to hold beauty contests (which incumbents can win more easily, because of their existing connections), instead of running a simple auction.

I'm sure there's lots of other barriers to entry you could dismantle.

[0] To have any real teeth, that new labeling requirement needs to be contestable in court. But that means that you better have a real good lawyer to look over your label. Incumbents are much more likely to be able to afford good lawyers.

> To the nearest IXP?

Actually yeah, that sounds like the correct metric to use.

> Latency to where? Greyface also asks "Latency is an end-to-end metric which will almost always involve path components beyond the control of your ISP - can and should they be held responsible for those paths?"

The latency you see is almost always from last-mile software, under the control of the ISP, and can be fixed locally. Before fixing, my local ISP gave me ping-time to the internet interconnect point in downtown Toronto that were typical of a link to Istanbul, Turkey (:-))

They weren't trying, and aren't to this day. Arguably they need a nice unfriendly regulator to require at least a good-faith attempt.

Latency to IXP or to a Tier 1 network seem like reasonable measures.

It could really be first hop latency, in some cases. I'm on DSL (vdsl2, I think), so I've got about 20 ms first hop latency and that's not great, but I am near Seattle, so I've also got 20 ms to a major IXP, which is fine.

Nearest IXP with at least three Tier 1 ISPs present and where the ISP in question generally peers also seems like a good target. I add the part about peering, because it's not great when I'm near Seattle, and rarher a lot of my traffic to seattle area servers goes through Portland or San Jose, because my ISP apparently doesn't like to peer in Seattle.

I would definately argue for physical latency to the isp's edge, and to several of the nearest CDNs. What is google doing with 8.8.8.9? Could they stick a quic server there for speedtest like metrics?

A third thing, which would drive more IXP adoption, would be latency between your phone over 5G to your desktop over broadband. Everybody should be able to collect that latter metric, methinks....

And then, go measure the bufferbloat those ways.

Honestly the latency to ANY real world service would be sufficient. They could nominate a dozen .gov websites and it could be ISP’s choice which one they test against. If they can have a fast ping to nasa.gov, then the infrastructure is capable of fast pings.

Bandwidth tests already deal with the ways ISPs might play games with upstream capacity.

Mean, median, and max relative to all connected devices within the Continental US, as well as to major gateways leaving. Would be a good start anyway. All parties should be responsible for their 'share' of latency (geographic distance, necessary switching nodes, etc.)

I agree with precisely all of the other answers so far. Any measurement would be as good or better than none. I'm curious what point you were trying to make though.

I'm of the same agreement, although somewhat partial to the IXP option, as it would force ILEC types to get better about routing to them. My point is that it's reductive to boil it down to a single number when it's going to vary significantly based on the endpoints the user chooses to communicate with - the 100ms target is great for a destination on the other side of the globe, but horrid for a destination in the same city.

I feel like it's obvious that it would be measuring local-ish latency. That's not reductive, it's separation of issues. If someone wants to communicate across the world, their total latency should be a consistent number added to the local-ish number.

If it's to the nearest IXP the ISP could create it's own IXP and measure latency to that. So it should be to not just any IXP, but a well-connected one

From the end user to majority open web sites/ips (minus waiting for server to respond)

To major backbones I suppose.

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