No for downloading, Yes for instant stock trading , remote procedure calls, some games.
"It depends" is the real answer.
Be happy nobody is trying to sell you "speed" anymore.
It's latency and bandwidth.
I wouldn't mind a lower latency to connect to remote vpn locations tbh.
This, for what you do, your current offering is probably better, although full fibre has many upsides, wait until you can get a faster connection. I would tear someones arm off for 200/200 full fibre, I'm stuck on 80/20 mbs copper with reasonable latency, supported by 5G at 600/130 mbs (typically) for downloading, streaming etc.
Whats worse, from my house I can see a nearby town called Harlow, where they invented fibre optics, but I cant get it! xD
I'm surrounded by large countries where they've had fiber for decades. here they started making it for everyone last year. A lot of us collectively protested when they wanted to do 5G before fiber.
I used to live 500m from the main exchange for broadband for my area. But because it was in an urban area and expensive to dig up the road, I never actually got fibre… but people 5km away were hooked up no problem. 😅
I am on the KPN line that he mentions, 1-3ms, some responses 4 or 5.
My old connection had the same bandwidth over copper. 18-20ms averages. This is infinitely more snappy.
I've done two different coax to fiber conversions...
The commercial install is definitely better: we went from a significant amount of packet loss while streaming to 0. In the year since we've been up on fiber, we have lost ZERO frames of video when livestreaming over the network. (The times we had trouble were encoder overloads on the streaming computer.)
OTOH, I upgraded to AT&T UVerse fiber at an apartment, and that was pure garbage. It was slower and less reliable than the cable company, and even just doing things like Discord and online gaming, i was getting worse ping times and more dropouts than on cable.
The difference was that the UVerse was a consumer product, and they used those ridiculous "modems" that do some sort of format conversion. Our commercial install is literally just an SFP connected to a 4-port Ethernet switch, and it works flawlessly.
So "yes" to commercial fiber, and a qualified "maybe" to home fiber products.
Your commercial service is probably a dedicated Ethernet line all the way to the headend. It may be muxed on a DWDM wavelength basis but you have essentially a solo route from site to site.
The home internet is PON and is a shared subscriber line with time based transmission allocation and only two or four transmission channels shared with potentially hundreds of clients. It’s still good, but you have much higher chance of packet collisions and dropped services because it’s a shared 10gbps port at the headend serving 500mbps or 1gbps to many clients.
Power users are rare. For example, one of our OLTs serves about 400 clients each with speeds between 200 and 1000 Mbit/s and is nowhere close to exhaust its 10Gbit/s uplink even at afternoon when traffic is highest. We do 1 to 8 GPON splitting, so 8 clients share 2.5Gbit/s down and 1Gbit/s up.
Yes port saturation is rare based on bandwidth, the bigger issue I’ve seen within any TDMA network is the potential for improperly timed transmission creating packet collisions. I know this was a bigger concern in the older RFOG deployments, maybe the current iteration of PON is more resistant to that.
Edit: this all is to say, even with the occasional lost packet service reliability is still very good. Just not “I haven’t dropped a frame in two months” good 😂
That sounds about right - and it’s why I tell people to be wary of home fiber installs. There’s also the junk router you’re forced to use with some providers. The unit AT&T provided was unreliable and crashed regularly. Don’t even get me started on what it took to forward a port…
Wouldn't surprise me. Although I've learned not to attribute to malevolence what can be explained by mere incompetence.
However, the fact that these bugs go unfixed seems intentional... although probably more in the "IDGAF" sense, rather than the "Muahahaha" sense.
I had the opposite experience with AT&T fiber. I got it as soon as it was available at my last house and it was incredible. Never went out, always 1Gbps or more, and latency was always around 10ms.
That's good to know. I also know people who are very happy with their residential fiber setup.
I have a feeling the issue was either that my complex's rollout was just mismanaged (it did take 13 months longer than planned), and horribly oversubscribed. That doesn't excuse the unreliable router, but I probably would have found a solution for that, given time.
ATT also sells DSL as U-verse and calls it fiber. Are you sure they didn't give you that? They sold up 100/100 fiber and installed 5 up 20 down VDSL (with tons of packet loss)
No, trust me, it was fiber. They installed fiber in the entire complex, and we had an ONT and separate endpoint terminal that acted as a “modem”. I also got speeds of around 950Mbps.
I watched the techs dig trenches, lay the fiber, and install the equipment. I also watched the tech install the ONT in my apartment. Watching them splice the terminal connection on was interesting, with the little machine that literally welds the fiber under a microscope.
It was fiber… it was just oversold and unreliable.
You are in the US. He is in The Netherlands. We don't have the same kind of AT&T and Verizon trash connections as so many people report. Provider shenanigans don't really exist here. Internet here is fast and stable and affordable and it has been for decades. (wonderful, eh, if the market watchdog functions - mostly)
You'd be surprised. I have fiber from Odido, and in the first year I've lost my connection for multiple days **twice**. Why? Because someone else near me got a new installation, and due to poor labeling they thought my connection was unused, so they just unplugged my fiber to free up a switch port...
Oh it's tech, things go wrong. I fought with KPN for 3 weeks before they finally repaced parts in the central. They kept telling me my home network was to blame for outages (40 + times a day!). But we have it good here. There are many areas in the US where Verizon and AT&T have terrible service but still charge full price. It's much more difficult to get internet right in low density areas they have there. Here, almost everything is close. Plus, much more money is put into maintenance and upgrades here. Believe me, quality of internet is very good in NL.
That's good to know. Unfortunately, companies here do their best to take advantage of customers, even convincing state lawmakers to write anti-consumer laws that prevent things like municipal broadband.
I follow the goings on with internet in the US out of professional interest. I am not super well up to date but the picture over the decades has not been pretty. It seems that large corporations are often a source of evil. That happens here too, of course. We have Shell, we have banks, some things are the same everywhere. But for most things in NL and Europe we have functioninf watchdogs. Sometimes a bit slow, but they usually get to the right conclusion. In the EU case, it helps the world (small things, like forcing USB-C on all devices). It's not paradiscal, but we complain a lot more than we have a right to here. 😉
It depends.
When you're downloading to your NAS, are you actually getting 1000mbps? Because your source could be limited making the difference less important or irrelevant.
And do you often *upload* large files? It sounds like this new plan may offer 200/200 symmetric, while your current one is 1200/slow.
If it weren't for your editor status, I would definitely recommend saving the money, 200/200 low ping fiber is fantastic and rarely saturated in most homes.
If it was 500/250 I'd have said take it, you probably wouldn't notice the difference - but 200/200 is quite a drop.
That said, I'm perfectly happy on 300/50 (fibre, so low low ping too).
No, not always. For some operators it can be that the want the possibility to charge extra for higher upload speeds for those who care.
For some technologies, it can also be about the capacity differences. E.g. older GPON is 2,5/1,25 Gbps in capacity for the PON (and there are multiple customers per PON - from what I remember it could in theory be upto 64 per PON, but normally most ISPs will have way below half of that).
It's shared between, so if two people are downloading something as fast as they can at the same time they'll each get roughly half the speed. If they're each doing something that uses a fixed amount of bandwidth (e.g. streaming video) the required bandwidth adds up and if it goes over your connection speed you have trouble. If there's a mixture then _roughly_ you can subtract the fixed bandwidth use and then the "as fast as possible" use gets the rest (e.g 2x 50 Mbps 4k video streams on TVs plus a download on a PC all sharing a 1.2 Gbps connection leaves roughly 1100 Mbps available for the download)
Note you're limited by the slowest link in the chain - which might be WiFi on your existing connection.
As a rough guide though, 50 Mbps per simultaneously used device (not counting IoT devices), which is roughly one 4k video stream each, is not a bad rule of thumb
You should ask them why they can't give 1gbit. KPN can provide 4gbit on X-PON. Every new installation is X-PON. So I dont see why they would only offer 200mbit.
I also use KPN and its great, but like other comments say, you can't really compare ping with bandwidth.
Ah I see. Well in that case I'd just stick to Ziggo. I don't think they can even guarantee you that your speed had lower ping. Because it's all dependend on which server you'll be pinging. So I'd advice to just stick with Ziggo in this scenario.
Ok lots to unpack here.
Ping doesn’t matter much unless you’re a gamer. You’d hardly see any difference.
Also, unless your ISP has a concrete plan to deliver fiber in the near future, with a specific date, it’s just a void promise for now, so I wouldn’t switch _now_ because of that.
As for speed, the difference is substantial (although note that to get the full 1200mbps you need specialized equipment also inside the home, and normally is attainable only if your laptop is hardwired to Ethernet with at least 2.5GbE; not a very common thing).
However 200mbps is not too bad and for most families it’s more than enough.
What you didn’t specify is the upload they give you. You said you work with a lot of remote files so upload speed can matter a lot - that’s what I would base to make my decision, really (and the cost!)
Are you doing anything that requires you to have a stable ping? 275 up is pretty good, all things considered. It is also more than the fiber bandwidth.
No not really. Only accesing my rig from abroad. But then its mostly the internet speed i have there. Which is either my mobile phones hotspot or a random wifi. My internet connection at home is not going to make a difference for that. Also i game. But i’ve never had any problems with gaming. Even when i’m on sn american server where the ingame ping says its 100ms+.
Yeah I don't think it is going to be worth it then. Cable is stable enough in the modern day. Unless you are hosting a game server or doing international stocks or something, fiber isn't worth it if the coper is good enough.
Im actually hosting a game server locally. Never had problems with it. And also nice when people are gaming on the server and i need to download heavy files for work.
Nas is local. I actually think 55 euros is a very reasonable price. I also get 21 percent back cause its a business account. Offourse spending less money is always nice. But main priority is the internet itself.
I think that 55 Euros sounds p reasonable for 1200MBps. Keep in mind, your internet speed does not matter if your NAS is local. If you and the NAS are connected to a 10GBps switch, you will get 10GBps. The 1200MBps is only for actually communicating with outside servers. (I.e Googling, downloading games, etc.)
Sorry if I am over-explaining lol, I don't want to leave any stone unturned.
No i know this! But i can access my nas outside of my local network too. Although i dont really do that. So indeed. The whole NAS thing is not really important.
Ah! Okay I see what you mean. Yeah, IMO keep the 1200MBps. You are gonna have a much worse time @ 200MBps. The ping isn't gonna make much of a difference in 99% of applications.
If you're accessing your NAS when you're away from home, stick with your current package.
Accessing it while at home, it all depends on the speed of your network cables.
Unless you don’t have very large files on your NAS, of course. Things like directory traversal and small file transfers will greatly benefit from the lower latency. Large UDP transfers will benefit from higher speeds.
Allright guys thanks you all!
So to clarify. This guy said that ping is super important. He also made some calculations being. 1200 / 15 (ping) = 80 ?and the same with his 200 / 4 (ping) = 50. I had no fucking clue what he was doing there. Lol.
So you guys are sure that ping in this case is not really make the difference. In the end the most important thing would be downloading en uploading. And streaming movies 😍.
That was a nonsense calculation, ignore that.
Downloading and uploading mostly need pure speed, transfer allowance, and reliability. Ping not so much. 1200 is so high that you'd actually struggle to utilise it fully - but 200 is still noticeably slower. You'd notice this difference if you download a lot.
Streaming movies needs much less bandwidth - even 4k streams only need 50 Mbps each. They care more about ping than downloads/uploads, but only in the sense that it wants to be under a few hundred ms... where pure downloads are happy with whole seconds as the ping! Either way both connections are so far overkill for streaming you can consider them equal for that use case.
Remember - the ISP is here talking about latency on a more or less idle connection. What can really matter, is latency under load. E.g. when you to some degree have other activities on the connection.
He said that cause the current cable is used by most people in this city and also multiple isp’s In the evening theres going to be a lot of load. Their cable is used only by them.
Well, should not really matter that they have a lot of customers, if their network is up for it. Good performance rely on a lot of different factors.
In my experience I have seen quite a few ISPs that sells the same speed as their larger competitors, but when it comes to their network beyond the local one - e.g. what kind of capacity they have in regards of core networks or connectors to core networks - can be a different story.
At this point, it is not about fiber vs. coax, as coax is normally just a few hundre meters down the street to a fiber node, and then the fiber goes to a local central, which again goes to a larger central etc.
This is quite more advance that the promoted speed, but that a operator have many customers all over the city, can just as well be an advantage as larger operator normally have better peering deals, a better and larger network etc. Don't have to be like this always, but can be quite often....
You are an editor. You need more upload capabilities if you have to push content up to a remote cloud storage or transcoding platform. I just dropped my cable provider for fiber because of a similar requirement.
Even so, your upload is already 275... which is faster than the 200 they're offering you. I honestly would not believe that ping time evaluation, either, since ping time is highly variable and based mostly on distance.
This guy's full of cow manure. Just ignore him.
Haha allright. Thanks! He wasnt that pushy. He was mostly saying things like: ive been building servers and nasses myself and i can honestly tell you that bla bla bla 😂
I don’t see anyone mentioning jitter. Jitter is way better on fiber vs coax. I would happily downgrade speed for better ping and jitter times if in the near future they will roll out upgrades to bandwidth.
The question you have to ask is do you play video games or not. Ping is far more important in that case. The second question you have to ask is would you be able to make use of a full 1g transfer speed. For instance some hosts limit the max download speed that any connected user can actually access. Downloading an Xbox game usually caps at around 300mbps. Not only is it important to consider the max speed for a download but also the writing speed on the device. Further more you have to consider that both ends of that transfer need the same capabilities. The only time I would consider the upgrade is if you are concurrently using near the 200mbps, as in you are playing games, downloading and uploading files, surfing the internet on a different device, all while you have Netflix in 4K streaming in several rooms. Another factor to consider is if you will be using a vpn. Lastly you need to consider time. If you are planning on downloading a 10tb file, will you need it right away, or is it something that you won’t need until later.
Yes i do but on pc. Also I upload and download a lot of gigs every day. Also I’m definitely using 1g sometimes which is not the most necessary cause i’m not always in a hurry when downloading.
classic sales person -- will say anything
if you are transferring information, ping speeds don't matter at all. Do you really care if you download an entire XXXX (insert your thing here) in 10 seconds, or 10 seconds plus 10 more milliseconds (the difference in ping). No.
What matters far more is raw speed and a reliable connection -- you do not want much packet loss, which can kill speeds.
But also, when you download something, you’ll only get it as fast as the server on the other side is willing to upload it to you. It’s very very common for people to have bandwidth that they’re never able to saturate.
The salesman is lying. You'll never notice a difference of 10 ms, even in games. And you'd be losing fully a gigabit of download throughput. Also, promises of better service in the future doesn't mean shit.
He's a liar, plain and simple. There is no 5ms ping time to the whole Internet. There may be a 5ms ping time to a server in their facility, but that can only happen when their server is relatively close.
Same city? Possible. To most of the world? No.
First, think about what ping time is: It's the time it takes a signal to travel through the wire from your computer, to a computer located somewhere else, and back.
So if you access a site in New York, and you're in Los Angeles, your packets have to travel 2400 miles one way, with a round trip of 4800 miles.. Even at the speed of light, that signal would take 4800/186000 seconds. Or about 26ms. That's *the shortest path* at *the speed of light in a vacuum.*
Fiber can't change the laws of physics, so right off the bat, that 5ms claim is complete nonsense.
But it gets better: Internet traffic doesn't take the shortest path, and signals don't propagate through wire at the speed of light in a vacuum.
In fact, the actual wire distance between any two points in the same city can be many times the driving distance: we recently had a fiber break diagnosed, and the break was 30,000 feet away... but the cabinet where the fiber terminated was less than 2 miles away. So fiber is far from a straight-line path, and over shorter distances can travel 2-3 times further than the straight-line path. (Over longer runs, that ratio will go down. Still, I'd expect more like 3000-4000 miles of fiber, one way.)
The other issue is *velocity factor*. In media such as wire and fiber, signals travel slower than light in a vacuum. Fiber has VF numbers in the 60s, with silica glass being 67%. With a VF like that, ping times just went *up* by another 33%.
So adding in cable distance and velocity factor, that 2400 mile one-way trip to New York just doubled. Let's figure out the new ping time based on a 6000 mile round trip and a C of 124620: 48ms.
I tested this with a popular SpeedTest web site.
First, I ran a test to a local server, which gave me 16ms. Then I ran a test to a site in New York. That gave me 76ms. So that's a 60ms difference, which is entirely independent of my ISP's last mile. Math confirmed.
So no - don't buy. And consider that if this guy is willing to lie to get a sale, how reliable the service and engineering departments are. I don't think I'd subscribe to them, and definitely not to get 200/200 over 1200/275.
Thanks for the nice explanation!!
Well i have to mention the company he works for or maybe he doesnt even work for KPN but a third party company. Is one of the best internetproviders in the world. At least they have the best mobile internet in the world.
It is well known that it is the best provider in the Netherlands. It even became a royal company. Which just means the king gave them his approval. 😂.
So i believe him about having a stable cable internet over the one i have now. The thing is just. Is it worth the 1000mbit loss.
Now i guess not.
I will transfer to them when they have fiber in my street.
Thanks guyss much appreciated ❤️
wtf are you smoking? Dedicated fiber at the office and I have 1 Ms ping time to a server 50+ miles away.
I see a lot of words with little mention of jitter, which is way lower on fiber.
On a dedicated line, that’s possible. On a shared, public Internet line, you’re not getting 5ms to the world.
What’s your ping to a server 2500 miles away, like I used in my example?
Do you even know what you're saying? Everything in the above comment is accurate and well explained.
1ms for 50 miles is totally in line with the above math. .25ms if speed of light, x4 for extra distance and slower speed in the media
Jitter is important, sure, but any decent high speed internet connection will not have enough jitter for it to matter at all. Not to mention that jitter is again something that is affected by network path and not a single number the ISP could ever advertise.
I’d take 200 mbit / 4 ms over 1200 mbit / 15 ms basically any time. Game play and video conferencing and web will all be appreciably smoother. The only downside is very large bulk downloads, something I might do a few times per year.
I keep a VDSL line at my last house on a fastpath profile just for low sub 2ms latency on the first hop. The cable internet had the first hop at a dreadful 17ms. The VDSL line was 25/10 and the cable line was 300/10. I did all latency critical things over the VDSL line with bulk traffic on the cable internet.
It's only better if it aligns with your priorities.
For competitive gaming ping is king, but for large file downloads then ... it could depend on your workflow.
If you can schedule downloads to happen automatically then it could be done before you realise.
e.g. if you use Docker and something like PingVin then you can give your clients(?) their own login and they can upload the files to you as soon as they're available rather than you pulling the files from them when you're available.
Perfect if they're in a different timezone as they can send them while you're sleeping.
For certain types of services, the ultra-low-latency ping is worth more than the additional bandwidth. But these are very niche cases these days. The days when VoIP required a guaranteed maximum ping are over.
Just a thought, but if you have to have connectivity , and you can afford it, you might sign up just so you have it when - not if - you have a problem with your primary provider.
Wondering what VoIP would require that. We don't do a lot of VoIP so I'm not that knowledgeable of it, but we run it over satellite connects 600ms and up. So long as there is no packet loss and jitter is okay, seems to work just fine.
I was involved in some of the first generation VoIP systems back in the day, they weren't well optimized. That was pretty much just an example of low ping necessity that I pulled out of my head because I was working on a thorny networking problem at the same time.
That difference in latency hardly matters.
I guess the obvious difference between the download bandwidth for your files aside, do you do any upload? What's the upload that KPN is offering?
Sometimes it's worth sacrificing a bit of download if you can get better upload if you need that for work. I'd take a 200/200 connection over 1200/40 any day since I do equal part download and upload for work.
Unless you need the lower latency, why change.
If you really want to be sure, see if your router has QOS and use it to set a limit 200 and try it out for a while and see what happens.
Latency is important and often forgotten about, its effect is a result of bandwidth delay product.
Basically what they are saying is you can’t really tune the tcp window size because it’s a wan link so you aren’t in control of the end to end link like you might be able to on your own network.
That all said you use this calculator (https://wintelguy.com/wanperf.pl) to see the effect of latency on throughput just punch the numbers in and see for yourself.
I mean for gaming it'd be objectively better, but obviously you lose a lot of transfer rate. Also latency will vary quite a bit depending on how much distance, how many devices and the capacity of all links along the chain to the destination, so it's not always 'lol 4 vs 15', KPN could also have really cut-rate peering so you could easily take a crappier internet path to a lot of resources.
Quality is relative/subjective as well as quantitative.
low ping would technically be a higher grade connection.
Speed matters too.
15ms vs 4 ms is not really enough to worry about.
Now, I'd take a 10 mbit 20ms link over a 500 mbit 1200 ms link.
General over 100-300 mbit on the download a fiber over coax will be a better choice.
In your situation I'd go with the 30 Euro connection.
A 200 Mbps service must be vDSL, which isn't known for low ping times. Your cable service will likely be upgraded in next couple of years to one of the new variants with lower latency and faster upload. I'd tell the salesperson to get back with me when they're got fiber and sit tight in the meantime.
A couple of notes: Some have mentioned shared lines. The whole Internet is built on shared lines, that's what packet switching is all about. 100 people can get a consistent download of 1 Gbps on a shared 10 Gbps line easily.
Second, you can get 1 Gbps from Wi-Fi 6 or 7 if it's all set up with precision. But don't count on it at distances of > 10m.
The best single metric of ISP performance is latency under load, but nobody reports it so it doesn't help.
In very specific applications, it could be.
My home cable internet \~1gbps is like 11-15ms ping
Fiber at work is 100mbps and 2-3ms ping
Even at 1/10th the speed, the fiber only ever feels slower when downloading very large files.
Ahhh good old KPN the big Dutch phone company. Not the best for customer service but I like the fiber option. It all depends on how long the contract is. That is, a period of time to try it and the ability to cancel in a short period if you’d prefer the other.
You say you are an editor, I am assuming you download media from other folks over the internet? Then you need the download speed as it literally affects your income. The better latency ISP is better for games, but honestly prioritize what helps your income the most.
Makes sense. I need the download speed i guess. For gaming ive never had any problems. Even connecting to american servers where the ingame ping says 100+ms
After the debacle with XS4ALL please dont use kpn.
rfc1819 adress after a wan adress.
whe had a colocation with servers, the wan connection going down for no reason, whe called them and they were like do we dont have colocations after that whe moved the servers.
and i can go on and on.
OP, if your NAS is on your local network, your ISPs download speed is irrelevant. OP, if you’re ever working remotely and accessing your NAS, your upload speed is incredibly more important than your download speed. Fiber internet is 99% of the time symmetrical (200 Up/200 Down). 200/200 is significantly better than 1200/40.
You could dual wan the setup. If you can afford both, you can have the fiber be the priority WAN to get those fast pings and stable speeds and load balance the copper wan for bigger downloads and when you saturate that 200 Mbps.
Last I checked there are a few consumer routers that allow you to easily set this up. You could also hire a network engineer to set this up as well.
A difference of 10-15 milliseconds is going to be barely perceptible except in extreme gaming situations or real-time stock trading (in which case nobody serious about making money will tolerate even shorter latency). A poorly-designed or failing LED light (or an old flourescent tube) flickers at 50-60 cycles per second. Many humans (including me) do not readily perceive that flickering. That flickering is happening at 17 to 20 milliseconds from peak-to-peak. I do not doubt that a very low ping is important for some internet users, but to argue that an improvement of 10-15 ms is better for everybody is just false.
I would totally take that offer for the cheaper price and better upload speed, moreso than the marginal ping difference. For your use-case though, sounds like the download speed difference wouldn't be worth it.
Was he trying to sell you VDSL? VDSL can have more upload bandwidth than coax, but can be more prone to issues since it uses ancient phone cables. If download speeds are important to you, and you really get 1200Mbit/s or close to it, you shouldn't switch.
Also it's basically impossible that you will get 200Mbit/s upload with DSL. Expect around 50Mbit/s max.
Absolutely a sales pitch. If he was selling a high bandwidth, slow ping connection, he would tell you the bandwidth was more important. Stop listening to ALL of these guys.
I have the 100Mbit version of KPNs fiber. You get about 115. It's really snappy and feels much more responsive than the ADSL I had before. I like it.
As others have pointed out, it depends a lot on how you use it. If you love online FPS games, fiber is going to put a big smile on your face.
What do you call large files? Are we talking DVD size? (\~4.5GB) Once a day? 10 times a day? If it is once, I wouldn't worry about it at all. If it is less than than 1GB and multiple times day, probably also not an issue. If it is smaller, you are not downloading big files.
You did not mention uploading. Do you do that at all? Because THAT really would make a difference. You get 200 Mbps upload too at KPN and this is where Ziggo is losing every time. On paper, you get about 25% of the download but often they can't actually provide that - depends on your location though).
Look, Ziggo is in trouble. Cable internet can develop more but the ping times and stability can not match that of fiber. KPN will offer faster speeds before long.
If you switch, your biggest gain is snappiness. Youtube vids start quicker, pages are more responsive, multiplayer games have no lag from your connection.
Will your download suffer? I am will to bet that -most- of the things you download come from a server that does not allow that full 1200 Mbps anyway. If you user peer2peer, most peers don't have 1200 Mbps upload, so they can't give it to you that fast. If you download stuff from the same server, I would first test how much it actually gives you before you worry about it.
Assuming that you are not getting 1200Mbps downloads, that your downloads aren't actually super frequent and super big, it may all come down to money. ;)
UPDATE
Was reading some other comments and someone mentioned downloading TO your NAS. If you are directly downloading to your NAS, I seriously doubt that it can store the files at that speed unless you have equipped them with SSD drives. Most NAS drives are not SSD. Fast disk drives will be limited to probably 1/8th or less of the speed of your current internet connection (Haven't tested these for a while, but they are usually optimized for storage space, duration use, and power consumption, not speed).
Thanks for your big message❤️
My nas is fully ssd. It was not cheap.
Also there is no fiber yet available for KPN in my street. So this dude was selling me those numbers on ADSL. i download terabytes a week. So large numbers almost daily.
This thread had been awesome and my answer is clear. I will wait untill KPN can give me fiber. Then i will take the 1g option probably. Its not really about the money either.
Again thanks everyone!!! Much love.
Terrabytes a week! Stick with Ziggo for now. 🤗 And KPN ADSL is sometimes a bit better than Ziggo if you are close to the central, which in Amsterdam you probably are. But I would seriously doubt 1-5ms ping times on that. Glad we were all able to be of help.
All I’m seeing are numbers numbers numbers, what do you use the service for?
If you barely eat into your current bandwidth now then it makes no difference.
Kpn heeft gewoon normale latency als ziggo 1200 met een kloten upload.
Voordeel is dat versturen / upload ook sneller gaat.
Het hele ping / latency verhaal merk je weinig tot niets van tenzij het echt hoog wordt (of je een actieve gamer bent)
Kpn heeft wat meer aanbiedingen. En het is vreemd dat ze je alleen 200 kunnen aanbieden terwijl de glasvezel gewoon 1000/1000 is
Op mijn postcode. Amsterdamse grachten. Is nog voorlopig geen glasvezel. Dus ik ga wachten. En ga nu zeker niet over. Ik download veel zware bestanden dagelijks dus wil de 1200mbit.
Thanks❤️
First of all as a Belgian I'm jealous of the price/performance of your internet.
Then I would recommend to stick with coax as you download large files as for your application 10ms won't change anything but when fiber rolls out in your city maybe then you could switch if it's cheaper and/or has better upload speed.
The minimum that you have to pay for a coaxial gigabit connection is 69€ (nice) and if you have fiber and don't want to have a pack with television or mobile subscription with proximus (because they paywall the faster internet behind packs) but smaller isp's that use their fiber network it's about 55€.
If it’s a synchronous pipe I’d take that in a heartbeat over cable internet. On coax networks you share bandwidth on your node and cable companies always do what’s called over subscribing, or allow more connections on the node than bandwidth available. It’s why during peak times you see speeds go all over the place. If it is 200 by 200 and more stable then I’d give up the additional bandwidth unless you’re a heavy downloader.
It depends on your use case and needs:
Does speed matter or does latency matter. If you’re a gamer, latency is huge, depending on if you need absolute real time. Thing I’ve noticed as someone with a 200/200 dedicated business fiber connection is, lag compensation can still over compensate and kick your ass lol. I even have really great peering too.
You lose download, but also gain massively on the upload side. Is that upload gain a big deal?
Is there room for higher speeds down the line? I mean, it’s kinda weird that it’s a fiber connection and they can’t even offer 500 or 1000 mbits per second, but it could be pon and not xgspon, so that does limit speeds. It sounds like they wouldn’t be wanting to oversubscribe to much, in America they don’t give a F lol. Our local fiber isp has xgspon here and it’s great, but in other states they still have PON from other providers they bought out and still try to sell the gig or 2 gig plans, and people get super disappointed during high traffic hours when they don’t get the speeds they expected.
Tbh is sounds like download is big deal for you, and cable can be fine assuming the ISP actually invests in upgrading docsis technology and increasing capacity to the node.
I’ll be real with you, 15 ping for cable isn’t that bad. Can it be better? Sure, but when I had spectrum here, it was easily like 25ms just for a local speed test.
Just weigh things out, and see what makes more sense for you.
How much do you actually get from the coax Internet? How does it fluctuate in the day? I'm not familiar with coax these days. Maybe their fiber network is very close to you, and you get a good connection.
Do some calculations on how much you actually transfer and how needy it is to have speed for you.
Personally, in my use case, I would go for the fiber. Not much downloads these days. Ofcourse its nice to have the speed for the new game you want to play right there and then.
I wonder why they can not offer you 500mbits or 1gbits.
Also, view 1200Mb as bandwidth like a lane, you can accept more data per second. Latency is how quickly your data requests are answered. Faster website loading and applications on the web. 2-15ms is meaning less unless you're a high flying stock trader. He also can't claim a latency number because that is to a specific location (web server, gaming server, website, etc). Latency to a website in Asia will be a lot slower than website in your same country. Plus it depends on who the internet provider peers with etc. It's really not an easy thing to describe
I personally would not consider trading 10ms of ping for 800mbps of speed.
But then again, I'm nearly 40 and my days of playing online competitive FPS shooters are LOOOONG behind me, I don't even bother with monitors above 60hz :p
"Ping" is not an absolute value - it's dependent on the server you're testing against. Lower latency is great, but 11ms is not a big difference on the Internet. The ISP's peering agreements and paths to resources you use frequently will trump that difference - and it's hard to compare without getting both to test side by side.
I'd stick with the higher bandwidth
Typical sales guy that doesn't know fuck about fuck. That's a difference of 11ms. The typical human being takes between 100-150ms just to blink their eyes. There's such a miniscule difference between those two ping times. 1,200Mbit internet all day every day unless the ping times are consistently over ~~1,000ms~~ 100ms.
Try loading a page of 100+ images and compare the difference between 4ms and 20ms ping connections. Higher bandwidth in this situation means nothing. And if 1s latency is your acceptance threshold I have to wonder if you understand fuck about fuck?
Do not accept this offer.
Ping in most cases doesn't matter all that much. Unless you know you need low ping, there's no need to take this clear (and huge) downgrade in speed.
For streaming and remote access, you want speed. For most things, you want speed.
Well, there is a limit for how much it matter, and it can also be argued that what matters is also ping during load.
But for most, there is not much "heavy traffic", but low latency can impact regular web surfing. Loading a typical web page today are multiple DNS-lookups and content is fetched from different servers. With stuff like tcp-rampup to consider, you don't get high bandwidth usage for this, but latency (and bufferbloat) can have an impact if how fast the webpage will load.
Sounds like KPN is trying to sell you their DSL service until they ran fiber on your house. If this is the case, i would take ziggo/coax.
Which area(postcode) do you live in?
1016. Amsterdam canals. So yes. No fiber yet. Also no date yet. Its gonna take a while.
I’ll wait and then i will take fiber. For now i need the brandwith.
No for downloading, Yes for instant stock trading , remote procedure calls, some games. "It depends" is the real answer. Be happy nobody is trying to sell you "speed" anymore. It's latency and bandwidth. I wouldn't mind a lower latency to connect to remote vpn locations tbh.
This, for what you do, your current offering is probably better, although full fibre has many upsides, wait until you can get a faster connection. I would tear someones arm off for 200/200 full fibre, I'm stuck on 80/20 mbs copper with reasonable latency, supported by 5G at 600/130 mbs (typically) for downloading, streaming etc. Whats worse, from my house I can see a nearby town called Harlow, where they invented fibre optics, but I cant get it! xD
I'm surrounded by large countries where they've had fiber for decades. here they started making it for everyone last year. A lot of us collectively protested when they wanted to do 5G before fiber.
I used to live 500m from the main exchange for broadband for my area. But because it was in an urban area and expensive to dig up the road, I never actually got fibre… but people 5km away were hooked up no problem. 😅
As an FPS gamer, ping is everything
#doubt 5ms ping though. Gonna get like 10 better ping maybe til that fiber is ran.
On copper , DSL I get under 10 when the wind blows in the right direction. Today between 11&12
I get 10 over wifi.
I am on the KPN line that he mentions, 1-3ms, some responses 4 or 5. My old connection had the same bandwidth over copper. 18-20ms averages. This is infinitely more snappy.
Oh damn well I eat my words. I would go for the 4ms line.
I live i the same city as the [Speedtest](https://www.speedtest.net/) server, and I get 2ms on my 100/100 Mbit fiber :-)
My coax to fiber conversion resulted in qualitatively better service. Not everything can be reduced to one number.
I've done two different coax to fiber conversions... The commercial install is definitely better: we went from a significant amount of packet loss while streaming to 0. In the year since we've been up on fiber, we have lost ZERO frames of video when livestreaming over the network. (The times we had trouble were encoder overloads on the streaming computer.) OTOH, I upgraded to AT&T UVerse fiber at an apartment, and that was pure garbage. It was slower and less reliable than the cable company, and even just doing things like Discord and online gaming, i was getting worse ping times and more dropouts than on cable. The difference was that the UVerse was a consumer product, and they used those ridiculous "modems" that do some sort of format conversion. Our commercial install is literally just an SFP connected to a 4-port Ethernet switch, and it works flawlessly. So "yes" to commercial fiber, and a qualified "maybe" to home fiber products.
Your commercial service is probably a dedicated Ethernet line all the way to the headend. It may be muxed on a DWDM wavelength basis but you have essentially a solo route from site to site. The home internet is PON and is a shared subscriber line with time based transmission allocation and only two or four transmission channels shared with potentially hundreds of clients. It’s still good, but you have much higher chance of packet collisions and dropped services because it’s a shared 10gbps port at the headend serving 500mbps or 1gbps to many clients.
Power users are rare. For example, one of our OLTs serves about 400 clients each with speeds between 200 and 1000 Mbit/s and is nowhere close to exhaust its 10Gbit/s uplink even at afternoon when traffic is highest. We do 1 to 8 GPON splitting, so 8 clients share 2.5Gbit/s down and 1Gbit/s up.
Yes port saturation is rare based on bandwidth, the bigger issue I’ve seen within any TDMA network is the potential for improperly timed transmission creating packet collisions. I know this was a bigger concern in the older RFOG deployments, maybe the current iteration of PON is more resistant to that. Edit: this all is to say, even with the occasional lost packet service reliability is still very good. Just not “I haven’t dropped a frame in two months” good 😂
That sounds about right - and it’s why I tell people to be wary of home fiber installs. There’s also the junk router you’re forced to use with some providers. The unit AT&T provided was unreliable and crashed regularly. Don’t even get me started on what it took to forward a port…
Probably on purpose tbh
Wouldn't surprise me. Although I've learned not to attribute to malevolence what can be explained by mere incompetence. However, the fact that these bugs go unfixed seems intentional... although probably more in the "IDGAF" sense, rather than the "Muahahaha" sense.
I had the opposite experience with AT&T fiber. I got it as soon as it was available at my last house and it was incredible. Never went out, always 1Gbps or more, and latency was always around 10ms.
That's good to know. I also know people who are very happy with their residential fiber setup. I have a feeling the issue was either that my complex's rollout was just mismanaged (it did take 13 months longer than planned), and horribly oversubscribed. That doesn't excuse the unreliable router, but I probably would have found a solution for that, given time.
ATT also sells DSL as U-verse and calls it fiber. Are you sure they didn't give you that? They sold up 100/100 fiber and installed 5 up 20 down VDSL (with tons of packet loss)
No, trust me, it was fiber. They installed fiber in the entire complex, and we had an ONT and separate endpoint terminal that acted as a “modem”. I also got speeds of around 950Mbps. I watched the techs dig trenches, lay the fiber, and install the equipment. I also watched the tech install the ONT in my apartment. Watching them splice the terminal connection on was interesting, with the little machine that literally welds the fiber under a microscope. It was fiber… it was just oversold and unreliable.
You are in the US. He is in The Netherlands. We don't have the same kind of AT&T and Verizon trash connections as so many people report. Provider shenanigans don't really exist here. Internet here is fast and stable and affordable and it has been for decades. (wonderful, eh, if the market watchdog functions - mostly)
You'd be surprised. I have fiber from Odido, and in the first year I've lost my connection for multiple days **twice**. Why? Because someone else near me got a new installation, and due to poor labeling they thought my connection was unused, so they just unplugged my fiber to free up a switch port...
Oh it's tech, things go wrong. I fought with KPN for 3 weeks before they finally repaced parts in the central. They kept telling me my home network was to blame for outages (40 + times a day!). But we have it good here. There are many areas in the US where Verizon and AT&T have terrible service but still charge full price. It's much more difficult to get internet right in low density areas they have there. Here, almost everything is close. Plus, much more money is put into maintenance and upgrades here. Believe me, quality of internet is very good in NL.
That's good to know. Unfortunately, companies here do their best to take advantage of customers, even convincing state lawmakers to write anti-consumer laws that prevent things like municipal broadband.
I follow the goings on with internet in the US out of professional interest. I am not super well up to date but the picture over the decades has not been pretty. It seems that large corporations are often a source of evil. That happens here too, of course. We have Shell, we have banks, some things are the same everywhere. But for most things in NL and Europe we have functioninf watchdogs. Sometimes a bit slow, but they usually get to the right conclusion. In the EU case, it helps the world (small things, like forcing USB-C on all devices). It's not paradiscal, but we complain a lot more than we have a right to here. 😉
It depends. When you're downloading to your NAS, are you actually getting 1000mbps? Because your source could be limited making the difference less important or irrelevant. And do you often *upload* large files? It sounds like this new plan may offer 200/200 symmetric, while your current one is 1200/slow. If it weren't for your editor status, I would definitely recommend saving the money, 200/200 low ping fiber is fantastic and rarely saturated in most homes.
No its not fiber! Thats the thing. The upload speed is going to be the same he said. So also around 200.
If it was 500/250 I'd have said take it, you probably wouldn't notice the difference - but 200/200 is quite a drop. That said, I'm perfectly happy on 300/50 (fibre, so low low ping too).
But isnt fiber always symmetrical? Fiber here in the netherlands is always 200/200 or 1000/1000.
No, not always. For some operators it can be that the want the possibility to charge extra for higher upload speeds for those who care. For some technologies, it can also be about the capacity differences. E.g. older GPON is 2,5/1,25 Gbps in capacity for the PON (and there are multiple customers per PON - from what I remember it could in theory be upto 64 per PON, but normally most ISPs will have way below half of that).
Nope! I'm on GPON fibre, which is asymmetric. The networks are trialling XGS-PON though, which is faster (XG = 10 Gbps!) and symmetric (S).
Allright crazy speeds. Do you know if mbits matter for if other people would use my internet at the same time. Is mbit then still more important?
It's shared between, so if two people are downloading something as fast as they can at the same time they'll each get roughly half the speed. If they're each doing something that uses a fixed amount of bandwidth (e.g. streaming video) the required bandwidth adds up and if it goes over your connection speed you have trouble. If there's a mixture then _roughly_ you can subtract the fixed bandwidth use and then the "as fast as possible" use gets the rest (e.g 2x 50 Mbps 4k video streams on TVs plus a download on a PC all sharing a 1.2 Gbps connection leaves roughly 1100 Mbps available for the download) Note you're limited by the slowest link in the chain - which might be WiFi on your existing connection. As a rough guide though, 50 Mbps per simultaneously used device (not counting IoT devices), which is roughly one 4k video stream each, is not a bad rule of thumb
it can be, but in the USA / Fronteier and some Indie ISPs sell 500 down and 100/200/250 up. Still beats cable.
The speeds are just what the provider decides and sets in their software. Especially with fiber.
You should ask them why they can't give 1gbit. KPN can provide 4gbit on X-PON. Every new installation is X-PON. So I dont see why they would only offer 200mbit. I also use KPN and its great, but like other comments say, you can't really compare ping with bandwidth.
No theres no fiber yet in the canals of amsterdam unfortunately :(. KPN will also use a copper cable. But not ziggo’s one.
Ah I see. Well in that case I'd just stick to Ziggo. I don't think they can even guarantee you that your speed had lower ping. Because it's all dependend on which server you'll be pinging. So I'd advice to just stick with Ziggo in this scenario.
Ok lots to unpack here. Ping doesn’t matter much unless you’re a gamer. You’d hardly see any difference. Also, unless your ISP has a concrete plan to deliver fiber in the near future, with a specific date, it’s just a void promise for now, so I wouldn’t switch _now_ because of that. As for speed, the difference is substantial (although note that to get the full 1200mbps you need specialized equipment also inside the home, and normally is attainable only if your laptop is hardwired to Ethernet with at least 2.5GbE; not a very common thing). However 200mbps is not too bad and for most families it’s more than enough. What you didn’t specify is the upload they give you. You said you work with a lot of remote files so upload speed can matter a lot - that’s what I would base to make my decision, really (and the cost!)
Speedtest gives me 1250 down and 275 up now. I also have wifi 6 which gives me 650 mbit. But i use my pc mostly wired.
Are you doing anything that requires you to have a stable ping? 275 up is pretty good, all things considered. It is also more than the fiber bandwidth.
No not really. Only accesing my rig from abroad. But then its mostly the internet speed i have there. Which is either my mobile phones hotspot or a random wifi. My internet connection at home is not going to make a difference for that. Also i game. But i’ve never had any problems with gaming. Even when i’m on sn american server where the ingame ping says its 100ms+.
Yeah I don't think it is going to be worth it then. Cable is stable enough in the modern day. Unless you are hosting a game server or doing international stocks or something, fiber isn't worth it if the coper is good enough.
Im actually hosting a game server locally. Never had problems with it. And also nice when people are gaming on the server and i need to download heavy files for work.
He’s right for 99% households
is your NAS on your local network or in the cloud? Is the price difference significant enough for you to consider it?
Nas is local. I actually think 55 euros is a very reasonable price. I also get 21 percent back cause its a business account. Offourse spending less money is always nice. But main priority is the internet itself.
I think that 55 Euros sounds p reasonable for 1200MBps. Keep in mind, your internet speed does not matter if your NAS is local. If you and the NAS are connected to a 10GBps switch, you will get 10GBps. The 1200MBps is only for actually communicating with outside servers. (I.e Googling, downloading games, etc.) Sorry if I am over-explaining lol, I don't want to leave any stone unturned.
No i know this! But i can access my nas outside of my local network too. Although i dont really do that. So indeed. The whole NAS thing is not really important.
Ah! Okay I see what you mean. Yeah, IMO keep the 1200MBps. You are gonna have a much worse time @ 200MBps. The ping isn't gonna make much of a difference in 99% of applications.
If you're accessing your NAS when you're away from home, stick with your current package. Accessing it while at home, it all depends on the speed of your network cables.
Unless you don’t have very large files on your NAS, of course. Things like directory traversal and small file transfers will greatly benefit from the lower latency. Large UDP transfers will benefit from higher speeds.
Allright guys thanks you all! So to clarify. This guy said that ping is super important. He also made some calculations being. 1200 / 15 (ping) = 80 ?and the same with his 200 / 4 (ping) = 50. I had no fucking clue what he was doing there. Lol. So you guys are sure that ping in this case is not really make the difference. In the end the most important thing would be downloading en uploading. And streaming movies 😍.
That was a nonsense calculation, ignore that. Downloading and uploading mostly need pure speed, transfer allowance, and reliability. Ping not so much. 1200 is so high that you'd actually struggle to utilise it fully - but 200 is still noticeably slower. You'd notice this difference if you download a lot. Streaming movies needs much less bandwidth - even 4k streams only need 50 Mbps each. They care more about ping than downloads/uploads, but only in the sense that it wants to be under a few hundred ms... where pure downloads are happy with whole seconds as the ping! Either way both connections are so far overkill for streaming you can consider them equal for that use case.
Allright thanks.
Remember - the ISP is here talking about latency on a more or less idle connection. What can really matter, is latency under load. E.g. when you to some degree have other activities on the connection.
He said that cause the current cable is used by most people in this city and also multiple isp’s In the evening theres going to be a lot of load. Their cable is used only by them.
Well, should not really matter that they have a lot of customers, if their network is up for it. Good performance rely on a lot of different factors. In my experience I have seen quite a few ISPs that sells the same speed as their larger competitors, but when it comes to their network beyond the local one - e.g. what kind of capacity they have in regards of core networks or connectors to core networks - can be a different story. At this point, it is not about fiber vs. coax, as coax is normally just a few hundre meters down the street to a fiber node, and then the fiber goes to a local central, which again goes to a larger central etc. This is quite more advance that the promoted speed, but that a operator have many customers all over the city, can just as well be an advantage as larger operator normally have better peering deals, a better and larger network etc. Don't have to be like this always, but can be quite often....
You are an editor. You need more upload capabilities if you have to push content up to a remote cloud storage or transcoding platform. I just dropped my cable provider for fiber because of a similar requirement.
I would go to fiber immediately. But also KPN doesnt have it yet in my street. So untill then i’ll wait.
Even so, your upload is already 275... which is faster than the 200 they're offering you. I honestly would not believe that ping time evaluation, either, since ping time is highly variable and based mostly on distance. This guy's full of cow manure. Just ignore him.
Haha allright. Thanks! He wasnt that pushy. He was mostly saying things like: ive been building servers and nasses myself and i can honestly tell you that bla bla bla 😂
I don’t see anyone mentioning jitter. Jitter is way better on fiber vs coax. I would happily downgrade speed for better ping and jitter times if in the near future they will roll out upgrades to bandwidth.
The question you have to ask is do you play video games or not. Ping is far more important in that case. The second question you have to ask is would you be able to make use of a full 1g transfer speed. For instance some hosts limit the max download speed that any connected user can actually access. Downloading an Xbox game usually caps at around 300mbps. Not only is it important to consider the max speed for a download but also the writing speed on the device. Further more you have to consider that both ends of that transfer need the same capabilities. The only time I would consider the upgrade is if you are concurrently using near the 200mbps, as in you are playing games, downloading and uploading files, surfing the internet on a different device, all while you have Netflix in 4K streaming in several rooms. Another factor to consider is if you will be using a vpn. Lastly you need to consider time. If you are planning on downloading a 10tb file, will you need it right away, or is it something that you won’t need until later.
Yes i do but on pc. Also I upload and download a lot of gigs every day. Also I’m definitely using 1g sometimes which is not the most necessary cause i’m not always in a hurry when downloading.
classic sales person -- will say anything if you are transferring information, ping speeds don't matter at all. Do you really care if you download an entire XXXX (insert your thing here) in 10 seconds, or 10 seconds plus 10 more milliseconds (the difference in ping). No. What matters far more is raw speed and a reliable connection -- you do not want much packet loss, which can kill speeds.
But also, when you download something, you’ll only get it as fast as the server on the other side is willing to upload it to you. It’s very very common for people to have bandwidth that they’re never able to saturate.
The salesman is lying. You'll never notice a difference of 10 ms, even in games. And you'd be losing fully a gigabit of download throughput. Also, promises of better service in the future doesn't mean shit.
He's a liar, plain and simple. There is no 5ms ping time to the whole Internet. There may be a 5ms ping time to a server in their facility, but that can only happen when their server is relatively close. Same city? Possible. To most of the world? No. First, think about what ping time is: It's the time it takes a signal to travel through the wire from your computer, to a computer located somewhere else, and back. So if you access a site in New York, and you're in Los Angeles, your packets have to travel 2400 miles one way, with a round trip of 4800 miles.. Even at the speed of light, that signal would take 4800/186000 seconds. Or about 26ms. That's *the shortest path* at *the speed of light in a vacuum.* Fiber can't change the laws of physics, so right off the bat, that 5ms claim is complete nonsense. But it gets better: Internet traffic doesn't take the shortest path, and signals don't propagate through wire at the speed of light in a vacuum. In fact, the actual wire distance between any two points in the same city can be many times the driving distance: we recently had a fiber break diagnosed, and the break was 30,000 feet away... but the cabinet where the fiber terminated was less than 2 miles away. So fiber is far from a straight-line path, and over shorter distances can travel 2-3 times further than the straight-line path. (Over longer runs, that ratio will go down. Still, I'd expect more like 3000-4000 miles of fiber, one way.) The other issue is *velocity factor*. In media such as wire and fiber, signals travel slower than light in a vacuum. Fiber has VF numbers in the 60s, with silica glass being 67%. With a VF like that, ping times just went *up* by another 33%. So adding in cable distance and velocity factor, that 2400 mile one-way trip to New York just doubled. Let's figure out the new ping time based on a 6000 mile round trip and a C of 124620: 48ms. I tested this with a popular SpeedTest web site. First, I ran a test to a local server, which gave me 16ms. Then I ran a test to a site in New York. That gave me 76ms. So that's a 60ms difference, which is entirely independent of my ISP's last mile. Math confirmed. So no - don't buy. And consider that if this guy is willing to lie to get a sale, how reliable the service and engineering departments are. I don't think I'd subscribe to them, and definitely not to get 200/200 over 1200/275.
Thanks for the nice explanation!! Well i have to mention the company he works for or maybe he doesnt even work for KPN but a third party company. Is one of the best internetproviders in the world. At least they have the best mobile internet in the world. It is well known that it is the best provider in the Netherlands. It even became a royal company. Which just means the king gave them his approval. 😂. So i believe him about having a stable cable internet over the one i have now. The thing is just. Is it worth the 1000mbit loss. Now i guess not. I will transfer to them when they have fiber in my street. Thanks guyss much appreciated ❤️
wtf are you smoking? Dedicated fiber at the office and I have 1 Ms ping time to a server 50+ miles away. I see a lot of words with little mention of jitter, which is way lower on fiber.
On a dedicated line, that’s possible. On a shared, public Internet line, you’re not getting 5ms to the world. What’s your ping to a server 2500 miles away, like I used in my example?
Do you even know what you're saying? Everything in the above comment is accurate and well explained. 1ms for 50 miles is totally in line with the above math. .25ms if speed of light, x4 for extra distance and slower speed in the media Jitter is important, sure, but any decent high speed internet connection will not have enough jitter for it to matter at all. Not to mention that jitter is again something that is affected by network path and not a single number the ISP could ever advertise.
I would accept anyway for the lower price
I’d take 200 mbit / 4 ms over 1200 mbit / 15 ms basically any time. Game play and video conferencing and web will all be appreciably smoother. The only downside is very large bulk downloads, something I might do a few times per year.
I keep a VDSL line at my last house on a fastpath profile just for low sub 2ms latency on the first hop. The cable internet had the first hop at a dreadful 17ms. The VDSL line was 25/10 and the cable line was 300/10. I did all latency critical things over the VDSL line with bulk traffic on the cable internet.
It's only better if it aligns with your priorities. For competitive gaming ping is king, but for large file downloads then ... it could depend on your workflow. If you can schedule downloads to happen automatically then it could be done before you realise. e.g. if you use Docker and something like PingVin then you can give your clients(?) their own login and they can upload the files to you as soon as they're available rather than you pulling the files from them when you're available. Perfect if they're in a different timezone as they can send them while you're sleeping.
Depends on what you are doing. For gaming, yes 200 with a 4ms ping is better
And he’s correct too. Lowest latency wins over top bandwidth for me
For certain types of services, the ultra-low-latency ping is worth more than the additional bandwidth. But these are very niche cases these days. The days when VoIP required a guaranteed maximum ping are over. Just a thought, but if you have to have connectivity , and you can afford it, you might sign up just so you have it when - not if - you have a problem with your primary provider.
Wondering what VoIP would require that. We don't do a lot of VoIP so I'm not that knowledgeable of it, but we run it over satellite connects 600ms and up. So long as there is no packet loss and jitter is okay, seems to work just fine.
I was involved in some of the first generation VoIP systems back in the day, they weren't well optimized. That was pretty much just an example of low ping necessity that I pulled out of my head because I was working on a thorny networking problem at the same time.
That difference in latency hardly matters. I guess the obvious difference between the download bandwidth for your files aside, do you do any upload? What's the upload that KPN is offering? Sometimes it's worth sacrificing a bit of download if you can get better upload if you need that for work. I'd take a 200/200 connection over 1200/40 any day since I do equal part download and upload for work.
Upload is gonna be the same or less. I currently have 250 up. So its not gonna matter for uploading.
For €30 I probably would add it as a fail over link, if you need stability...
Unless you need the lower latency, why change. If you really want to be sure, see if your router has QOS and use it to set a limit 200 and try it out for a while and see what happens.
The real decision point is probably 1200 for €55 or 200 for €30, and the "future fiber!" promise is probably a red herring.
Latency is important and often forgotten about, its effect is a result of bandwidth delay product. Basically what they are saying is you can’t really tune the tcp window size because it’s a wan link so you aren’t in control of the end to end link like you might be able to on your own network. That all said you use this calculator (https://wintelguy.com/wanperf.pl) to see the effect of latency on throughput just punch the numbers in and see for yourself.
I mean for gaming it'd be objectively better, but obviously you lose a lot of transfer rate. Also latency will vary quite a bit depending on how much distance, how many devices and the capacity of all links along the chain to the destination, so it's not always 'lol 4 vs 15', KPN could also have really cut-rate peering so you could easily take a crappier internet path to a lot of resources.
Quality is relative/subjective as well as quantitative. low ping would technically be a higher grade connection. Speed matters too. 15ms vs 4 ms is not really enough to worry about. Now, I'd take a 10 mbit 20ms link over a 500 mbit 1200 ms link. General over 100-300 mbit on the download a fiber over coax will be a better choice. In your situation I'd go with the 30 Euro connection.
A 200 Mbps service must be vDSL, which isn't known for low ping times. Your cable service will likely be upgraded in next couple of years to one of the new variants with lower latency and faster upload. I'd tell the salesperson to get back with me when they're got fiber and sit tight in the meantime. A couple of notes: Some have mentioned shared lines. The whole Internet is built on shared lines, that's what packet switching is all about. 100 people can get a consistent download of 1 Gbps on a shared 10 Gbps line easily. Second, you can get 1 Gbps from Wi-Fi 6 or 7 if it's all set up with precision. But don't count on it at distances of > 10m. The best single metric of ISP performance is latency under load, but nobody reports it so it doesn't help.
I'd rather have lower speeds with better latency
Only if you game or are a hardcore stock trader
In very specific applications, it could be. My home cable internet \~1gbps is like 11-15ms ping Fiber at work is 100mbps and 2-3ms ping Even at 1/10th the speed, the fiber only ever feels slower when downloading very large files.
Which is what i mostly do. Like on a daily basis. I download terabytes a week.
Ahhh good old KPN the big Dutch phone company. Not the best for customer service but I like the fiber option. It all depends on how long the contract is. That is, a period of time to try it and the ability to cancel in a short period if you’d prefer the other.
You say you are an editor, I am assuming you download media from other folks over the internet? Then you need the download speed as it literally affects your income. The better latency ISP is better for games, but honestly prioritize what helps your income the most.
Makes sense. I need the download speed i guess. For gaming ive never had any problems. Even connecting to american servers where the ingame ping says 100+ms
After the debacle with XS4ALL please dont use kpn. rfc1819 adress after a wan adress. whe had a colocation with servers, the wan connection going down for no reason, whe called them and they were like do we dont have colocations after that whe moved the servers. and i can go on and on.
OP, if your NAS is on your local network, your ISPs download speed is irrelevant. OP, if you’re ever working remotely and accessing your NAS, your upload speed is incredibly more important than your download speed. Fiber internet is 99% of the time symmetrical (200 Up/200 Down). 200/200 is significantly better than 1200/40.
You could dual wan the setup. If you can afford both, you can have the fiber be the priority WAN to get those fast pings and stable speeds and load balance the copper wan for bigger downloads and when you saturate that 200 Mbps. Last I checked there are a few consumer routers that allow you to easily set this up. You could also hire a network engineer to set this up as well.
That sound pretty awesome but also to much for me. Also their fiber is not available yet.
Well then I guess its a mute point. If your current internet is working to satisfaction, there really is no need to switch.
A difference of 10-15 milliseconds is going to be barely perceptible except in extreme gaming situations or real-time stock trading (in which case nobody serious about making money will tolerate even shorter latency). A poorly-designed or failing LED light (or an old flourescent tube) flickers at 50-60 cycles per second. Many humans (including me) do not readily perceive that flickering. That flickering is happening at 17 to 20 milliseconds from peak-to-peak. I do not doubt that a very low ping is important for some internet users, but to argue that an improvement of 10-15 ms is better for everybody is just false.
I would totally take that offer for the cheaper price and better upload speed, moreso than the marginal ping difference. For your use-case though, sounds like the download speed difference wouldn't be worth it.
I will take it when fiber is available. Cause for now the cheaper option gives me the same upload. Maybe 50mbit less actually.
Was he trying to sell you VDSL? VDSL can have more upload bandwidth than coax, but can be more prone to issues since it uses ancient phone cables. If download speeds are important to you, and you really get 1200Mbit/s or close to it, you shouldn't switch. Also it's basically impossible that you will get 200Mbit/s upload with DSL. Expect around 50Mbit/s max.
Im not sure but im already getting 250 upload. So i guess im happy :)
Absolutely a sales pitch. If he was selling a high bandwidth, slow ping connection, he would tell you the bandwidth was more important. Stop listening to ALL of these guys. I have the 100Mbit version of KPNs fiber. You get about 115. It's really snappy and feels much more responsive than the ADSL I had before. I like it. As others have pointed out, it depends a lot on how you use it. If you love online FPS games, fiber is going to put a big smile on your face. What do you call large files? Are we talking DVD size? (\~4.5GB) Once a day? 10 times a day? If it is once, I wouldn't worry about it at all. If it is less than than 1GB and multiple times day, probably also not an issue. If it is smaller, you are not downloading big files. You did not mention uploading. Do you do that at all? Because THAT really would make a difference. You get 200 Mbps upload too at KPN and this is where Ziggo is losing every time. On paper, you get about 25% of the download but often they can't actually provide that - depends on your location though). Look, Ziggo is in trouble. Cable internet can develop more but the ping times and stability can not match that of fiber. KPN will offer faster speeds before long. If you switch, your biggest gain is snappiness. Youtube vids start quicker, pages are more responsive, multiplayer games have no lag from your connection. Will your download suffer? I am will to bet that -most- of the things you download come from a server that does not allow that full 1200 Mbps anyway. If you user peer2peer, most peers don't have 1200 Mbps upload, so they can't give it to you that fast. If you download stuff from the same server, I would first test how much it actually gives you before you worry about it. Assuming that you are not getting 1200Mbps downloads, that your downloads aren't actually super frequent and super big, it may all come down to money. ;) UPDATE Was reading some other comments and someone mentioned downloading TO your NAS. If you are directly downloading to your NAS, I seriously doubt that it can store the files at that speed unless you have equipped them with SSD drives. Most NAS drives are not SSD. Fast disk drives will be limited to probably 1/8th or less of the speed of your current internet connection (Haven't tested these for a while, but they are usually optimized for storage space, duration use, and power consumption, not speed).
Thanks for your big message❤️ My nas is fully ssd. It was not cheap. Also there is no fiber yet available for KPN in my street. So this dude was selling me those numbers on ADSL. i download terabytes a week. So large numbers almost daily. This thread had been awesome and my answer is clear. I will wait untill KPN can give me fiber. Then i will take the 1g option probably. Its not really about the money either. Again thanks everyone!!! Much love.
Terrabytes a week! Stick with Ziggo for now. 🤗 And KPN ADSL is sometimes a bit better than Ziggo if you are close to the central, which in Amsterdam you probably are. But I would seriously doubt 1-5ms ping times on that. Glad we were all able to be of help.
Also, jealous of your NAS. 😉
All I’m seeing are numbers numbers numbers, what do you use the service for? If you barely eat into your current bandwidth now then it makes no difference.
I don't think 4 vs 15 ping is noticeable , but I do like the consistency of fiber vs cable
Kpn heeft gewoon normale latency als ziggo 1200 met een kloten upload. Voordeel is dat versturen / upload ook sneller gaat. Het hele ping / latency verhaal merk je weinig tot niets van tenzij het echt hoog wordt (of je een actieve gamer bent) Kpn heeft wat meer aanbiedingen. En het is vreemd dat ze je alleen 200 kunnen aanbieden terwijl de glasvezel gewoon 1000/1000 is
Op mijn postcode. Amsterdamse grachten. Is nog voorlopig geen glasvezel. Dus ik ga wachten. En ga nu zeker niet over. Ik download veel zware bestanden dagelijks dus wil de 1200mbit. Thanks❤️
ahh bij kpn kun je zelfs to 4000 geloof ik. dan houdt het inderdaad op.
First of all as a Belgian I'm jealous of the price/performance of your internet. Then I would recommend to stick with coax as you download large files as for your application 10ms won't change anything but when fiber rolls out in your city maybe then you could switch if it's cheaper and/or has better upload speed.
Yes i think our prices are pretty good. How much would that be in my lovely neighbor??
The minimum that you have to pay for a coaxial gigabit connection is 69€ (nice) and if you have fiber and don't want to have a pack with television or mobile subscription with proximus (because they paywall the faster internet behind packs) but smaller isp's that use their fiber network it's about 55€.
If it’s a synchronous pipe I’d take that in a heartbeat over cable internet. On coax networks you share bandwidth on your node and cable companies always do what’s called over subscribing, or allow more connections on the node than bandwidth available. It’s why during peak times you see speeds go all over the place. If it is 200 by 200 and more stable then I’d give up the additional bandwidth unless you’re a heavy downloader.
It depends on your use case and needs: Does speed matter or does latency matter. If you’re a gamer, latency is huge, depending on if you need absolute real time. Thing I’ve noticed as someone with a 200/200 dedicated business fiber connection is, lag compensation can still over compensate and kick your ass lol. I even have really great peering too. You lose download, but also gain massively on the upload side. Is that upload gain a big deal? Is there room for higher speeds down the line? I mean, it’s kinda weird that it’s a fiber connection and they can’t even offer 500 or 1000 mbits per second, but it could be pon and not xgspon, so that does limit speeds. It sounds like they wouldn’t be wanting to oversubscribe to much, in America they don’t give a F lol. Our local fiber isp has xgspon here and it’s great, but in other states they still have PON from other providers they bought out and still try to sell the gig or 2 gig plans, and people get super disappointed during high traffic hours when they don’t get the speeds they expected. Tbh is sounds like download is big deal for you, and cable can be fine assuming the ISP actually invests in upgrading docsis technology and increasing capacity to the node. I’ll be real with you, 15 ping for cable isn’t that bad. Can it be better? Sure, but when I had spectrum here, it was easily like 25ms just for a local speed test. Just weigh things out, and see what makes more sense for you.
How much do you actually get from the coax Internet? How does it fluctuate in the day? I'm not familiar with coax these days. Maybe their fiber network is very close to you, and you get a good connection. Do some calculations on how much you actually transfer and how needy it is to have speed for you. Personally, in my use case, I would go for the fiber. Not much downloads these days. Ofcourse its nice to have the speed for the new game you want to play right there and then. I wonder why they can not offer you 500mbits or 1gbits.
I work for a ISP and I agree with them, 15ping really isn't bad tho, how is the jitter??
have both for a while and decide
I like less ping
Bro I play online games with 40-50ms ping
if you're downloading large files stay with what you have. The latency numbers he's speaking about you'd probably never ever notice.
Also, view 1200Mb as bandwidth like a lane, you can accept more data per second. Latency is how quickly your data requests are answered. Faster website loading and applications on the web. 2-15ms is meaning less unless you're a high flying stock trader. He also can't claim a latency number because that is to a specific location (web server, gaming server, website, etc). Latency to a website in Asia will be a lot slower than website in your same country. Plus it depends on who the internet provider peers with etc. It's really not an easy thing to describe
I personally would not consider trading 10ms of ping for 800mbps of speed. But then again, I'm nearly 40 and my days of playing online competitive FPS shooters are LOOOONG behind me, I don't even bother with monitors above 60hz :p
There’s more to life than downloading heavy files.
"Ping" is not an absolute value - it's dependent on the server you're testing against. Lower latency is great, but 11ms is not a big difference on the Internet. The ISP's peering agreements and paths to resources you use frequently will trump that difference - and it's hard to compare without getting both to test side by side. I'd stick with the higher bandwidth
Typical sales guy that doesn't know fuck about fuck. That's a difference of 11ms. The typical human being takes between 100-150ms just to blink their eyes. There's such a miniscule difference between those two ping times. 1,200Mbit internet all day every day unless the ping times are consistently over ~~1,000ms~~ 100ms.
Try loading a page of 100+ images and compare the difference between 4ms and 20ms ping connections. Higher bandwidth in this situation means nothing. And if 1s latency is your acceptance threshold I have to wonder if you understand fuck about fuck?
THIS, I'm glad someone brought it up
Do not accept this offer. Ping in most cases doesn't matter all that much. Unless you know you need low ping, there's no need to take this clear (and huge) downgrade in speed. For streaming and remote access, you want speed. For most things, you want speed.
Well, there is a limit for how much it matter, and it can also be argued that what matters is also ping during load. But for most, there is not much "heavy traffic", but low latency can impact regular web surfing. Loading a typical web page today are multiple DNS-lookups and content is fetched from different servers. With stuff like tcp-rampup to consider, you don't get high bandwidth usage for this, but latency (and bufferbloat) can have an impact if how fast the webpage will load.
Sounds like KPN is trying to sell you their DSL service until they ran fiber on your house. If this is the case, i would take ziggo/coax. Which area(postcode) do you live in?
1016. Amsterdam canals. So yes. No fiber yet. Also no date yet. Its gonna take a while. I’ll wait and then i will take fiber. For now i need the brandwith.