[Starlink] Itʼs the Latency, FCC

[Colin_Higbie]

Beautifully said, David Lang. I completely agree.

At the same time, I do think if you give people tools where latency is rarely an issue (say a 10x improvement, so perception of 1/10 the latency), developers will be less efficient UNTIL that inefficiency begins to yield poor UX. For example, if I know I can rely on latency being 10ms and users don't care until total lag exceeds 500ms, I might design something that uses a lot of back-and-forth between client and server. As long as there are fewer than 50 iterations (500 / 10), users will be happy. But if I need to do 100 iterations to get the result, then I'll do some bundling of the operations to keep the total observable lag at or below that 500ms. 

I remember programming computer games in the 1980s and the typical RAM users had increased. Before that, I had to contort my code to get it to run in 32kB. After the increase, I could stretch out and use 48kB and stop wasting time shoehorning my code or loading-in segments from floppy disk into the limited RAM. To your point: yes, this made things faster for me as a developer, just as the latency improvements ease the burden on the client-server application developer who needs to ensure a maximum lag below 500ms.

In terms of user experience (UX), I think of there as being "good enough" plateaus based on different use-cases. For example, when web browsing, even 1,000ms of latency is barely noticeable. So any web browser application that comes in under 1,000ms will be "good enough." For VoIP, the "good enough" figure is probably more like 100ms. For video conferencing, maybe it's 80ms (the ability to see the person's facial expression likely increases the expectation of reactions and reduces the tolerance for lag). For some forms of cloud gaming, the "good enough" figure may be as low as 5ms. 

That's not to say that 20ms isn't better for VoIP than 100 or 500ms isn't better than 1,000 for web browsing, just that the value for each further incremental reduction in latency drops significantly once you get to that good-enough point. However, those further improvements may open entirely new applications, such as enabling VoIP where before maybe it was only "good enough" for web browsing (think geosynchronous satellites).

In other words, more important than just chasing ever lower latency, it's important to provide SUFFICIENTLY LOW latency for users to perform their intended applications. Getting even lower is still great for opening things up to new applications we never considered before, just like faster CPU's, more RAM, better graphics, etc. have always done since the first computer. But if we're talking about measuring what people need today, this can be done fairly easily based on intended applications. 

Bandwidth scales a little differently. There's still a "good enough" level driven by time for a web page to load of about 5s (as web pages become ever more complex and dynamic, this means that bandwidth needs increase), 1Mbps for VoIP, 7Mbps UL/DL for video conferencing, 20Mbps DL for 4K streaming, etc. In addition, there's also a linear scaling to the number of concurrent users. If 1 user needs 15Mbps to stream 4K, 3 users in the household will need about 45Mbps to all stream 4K at the same time, a very real-world scenario at 7pm in a home. This differs from the latency hit of multiple users. I don't know how latency is affected by users, but I know if it's 20ms with 1 user, it's NOT 40ms with 2 users, 60ms with 3, etc. With the bufferbloat improvements created and put forward by members of this group, I think latency doesn't increase by much with multiple concurrent streams.

So all taken together, there can be fairly straightforward descriptions of latency and bandwidth based on expected usage. These are not mysterious attributes. It can be easily calculated per user based on expected use cases. 

Cheers,
Colin

-----Original Message-----
From: David Lang <david at lang.hm> 
Sent: Friday, March 15, 2024 7:08 PM
To: Spencer Sevilla <spencer.builds.networks at gmail.com>
Cc: Colin_Higbie <CHigbie1 at Higbie.name>; Dave Taht via Starlink <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net>
Subject: Re: [Starlink] Itʼs the Latency, FCC

one person's 'wasteful resolution' is another person's 'large enhancement'

going from 1080p to 4k video is not being wasteful, it's opting to use the bandwidth in a different way.

saying that it's wasteful for someone to choose to do something is saying that you know better what their priorities should be.

I agree that increasing resources allow programmers to be lazier and write apps that are bigger, but they are also writing them in less time.

What right do you have to say that the programmer's time is less important than the ram/bandwidth used?

I agree that it would be nice to have more people write better code, but everything, including this, has trade-offs.

David Lang