DSL runs along your phone line. It's been around for a longtime and it has gotten better, as the years have gone on. Frankly, it can be a really good option, if you're really close to your ISP, because the primaryweakness of DSL is distance. The farther you are from your ISP, the slower your connection. Cable internet runs through copper wire on a coax connection, and it tends to be much faster than DSL,at least historically. Cable doesn't rely on proximityto deliver a strong signal, so it doesn't reallymatter how far you are from your provider, as long as that line can reach your house. But, cable is not without it's weaknesses. Like DSL, the existingcable infrastructure, is starting to show it's age, which can occasionally affect reliability. But, the biggest weaknessof cable is that, unlike DSL, cable is a shared connection.
Think of it like a tree,with the cable company laying trunk lines whichsplit into branches that head through aneighborhood, or down a street, and then individual linesshoot off of those branches. So, if you have a lot ofpeople sharing a branch, and when everybody logs onduring high traffic hours, everyone's signal is gonnaslow down significantly. Finally, we have fiber, whichis a wire made from glass, or plastic, instead ofthe traditional copper, of cable or DSL. Now, I'll skip the science lesson, which frankly, I'm notqualified to give anyway, and I'll just say that because of the type of wire ituses, fiber is fast. Like really, really, fast. Gigabit internet speedsare just the beginning of what fiber's capable of delivering.
But, fiber's biggest strength,from the point of view of most of us consumers, isthat it's generally symmetrical, instead of asymmetrical. An asymmetrical connection,like what you usually get with cable or DSL,means that you might get a 100 megabits persecond of download speed, but your upload speed is only,say 10 megabits per second. That means you're receivingdata really quickly, but you're sending it much more slowly. Fiber's symmetrical connections though, mean that generally, becauseyou're getting gigabit download speeds, you're alsogetting gigabit upload speeds.
Now, for gamers who areconstantly both sending and receiving data to keep upwith the game in real time, you can see how attractive this would be. Especially if you'resay, a Twitch streamer, and you need those uploadspeeds for your live streams. There's only one problem with all this. Believe it or not, aftereverything I just went through, speed isn't even the most important thing for a gamer to worry about. Especially if you're not streaming. It's not that speed isn't important, but it is secondary to thethree most important internet terms for a gamer to know. Latency or ping, packet loss and jitter. Now, latency is simple. It's the amount of timeit takes for a signal to make a round trip between you and your internet service provider.
When it comes to latency, lower is better. So, 300 milliseconds of ping,probably not gonna work. 20 milliseconds, you're doing fine there. Incidentally, this iswhy satellite internet, with it's satellite orbiting22,000 miles away from you, has a hard time keepingup with real-time gaming. Packets are the bundles ofdata that are being sent back and forth between you and your ISP. Naturally, you don't wantthose packets getting lost or corrupted in transit, whichwould mean that they need to be resent, increasing your latency. Again, the closer this numberis to zero, the better.
And finally, jitter. Jitter is the change inyour latency over time. Maybe that doesn't sound like a big deal, but if your latency is usuallysitting at 20 milliseconds, and then it suddenly plummetsto 10 or jumps to 30, then those data packets aregoing to arrive out of order, and it creates a whole new kind of mess. So, the dirty secret is this,speed matters in gaming, but not nearly as much assome marketing materials would have you believe. Gaming actually requiresrelatively low speeds. Sometimes less than asingle megabit per second. What matters more is howreliable are your connection is when it comes to latency,packet loss and jitter. And, any of our three connection types, can deliver good resultsin those categories.
So, who cares about fiber and it's fancy super-fast symmetrical speeds, right? Well, the thing is,fiber often, not always, but often performs better inthose other categories too. Fiber networks tend tobe newer, more reliable. The only problem here isthat it's really expensive, and difficult to getinfrastructure in place. Believe me, I should know. Google fiber was beinginstalled where I live in Salt Lake City but,even the almighty Google, decided it was too rich fortheir blood and abandoned the project right beforethey got to my street. Yeah, that one hurt. Anyway, where was I? Right, so fiber isn'tnecessarily better for gaming, but it often is, simplybecause of how reliable it tends to beg. Thank Guys!
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