New minimum speed for US broadband connections

Tue Jun 1 13:28:54 UTC 2021

I have seen a lot of questions about what is needed for video/eLearning/telehealth. IMO the beauty of those apps is that they use adaptive bitrate protocols and can work in a wide range of last mile environments – even quite acceptably via mobile network while you are in transit. In my experience most of the challenges people experience are due to home LAN (especially WiFi) issues, with working latency an underlying issue (aka latency under load).

Some recent papers from NetForecast on video conferencing (https://www.netforecast.com/wp-content/uploads/NFR5137-Videoconferencing_Internet_Requirements.pdf) and eLearning (https://www.netforecast.com/wp-content/uploads/NFR5141-eLearning-Bandwidth-Requirements.Final_.pdf) were based on observed actual usage rather than theoreticals. What caught my eye was their unique focus in the 1st paper in Figure 8 – laying out the rationale for a network “latency budget”. In essence, after 580 ms of delay someone will notice audio delay and feel the session is bad. A conference platform’s clients & servers may use up 300 ms of their own in processing, leaving about 280 ms for the network. If you working latency starts to exceed that on the LAN (not uncommon) then user QoE degrades.

JL
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