When working remotely, latency matters because it's so awkward in video meetings when you're 1/4 second behind everyone else.
But something else that matters (possibly not so much in the US, but definitely in many other countries) is mini internet 'brown outs', where there's a sudden internet drop out for just a few seconds. I don't know what statistic would be good for measuring that. But when it happens during a meeting it's quite annoying and noticeable. In some parts of the world they seem to occur about once an hour, although YMMV.
On a somewhat related note, there are some channels on 802.11ac that are designated as "DFS" (dynamic frequency switching) channels, because they are sharing frequency ranges with weather radar equipment. Networking equipment will periodically monitor for radar signals. I think I heard somewhere that this monitoring for radar signals will temporarily add extra latency to the connection during this time. If any equipment detects a radar signal, it ends the wifi network and switches to another channel. But if another DFS channel is chosen at this time, there is a 60 second timeout before the new channel is confirmed.
So if you're trying to avoid latency spikes, don't use DFS channels on 802.11ac.
I remember having problems with Meraki Access Points where if you set the channel to auto, it'd choose a DFS channel, then within a day all of them would be on the same non-DFS channel. Manually setting each AP to different non-DFS channels helped but eventually they were replaced with better non-Meraki APs.
In general, using an empty channel, less wide, has more range, and with less interference
So I would vastly prefer that in contended scenarios - an apartment building for example - that the actual channel width provisioned to be not be much more than what the ISP is providing. (and that the wifi be de-bufferbloated: https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/ )
Instead people keep provisioning 160mhz channels with dozens of other APs also living on those channels, and interference and retries go way up...
Above 50Mbits, most of the bufferbloat problem shifts to the wifi.
> But something else that matters (possibly not so much in the US, but definitely in many other countries) is mini internet 'brown outs', where there's a sudden internet drop out for just a few seconds.
Availability, i.e., uptime of your link. Frequency of availability interruption etc.
Yes! I moved from France to Canada in Montreal and for some reason internet is just not reliable there, across three providers in multiple apartments I could see packet losses, regular drop outs, etc. Very frustrating when you're used to absolutely rock solid internet.
Welcome to the revolution where huge oversubscribing is the norm. Everyone sells 100Mbit, 300Mbit, 1GE internet or even more.. Poeple often start to talk about 10GE CPEs.. bigger faster.. its partially consumers fault but meh. I would many times would prefer rock solid 10Mbit connection that crappy 100Mbit connection.
But, luicky I live in big city with multiple ISPs offering. I have 2 ISPs at flat atm, one is ETTH (primary) and second is Cable for backup. ETTH is good, nice peerings, low RTT and very small <1ms jitter. Cable, well.. its cable. They expanded they peerings so RTT dropped, but jitter is noticeable. Its all right, its backup connection after all.
The fact that my internet connection drops for, say, 5 mins twice a day is enough to make me go to the office and work from there. It's surprisingly disruptive.
I have proposed "Glitches per minute" where there is a perceptible glitch while videoconferencing + some other load. The poster child for this is Starlink, which glitches 4 times a minute....
>where there's a sudden internet drop out for just a few seconds.
I have had this on wifi for sure, but never wired with ethernet.
Not an ISP issue.
Sweden. So not USA. But western country where we decided to invest in broadband infra.
I am on DOCSIS/COAX modem/router combo. 200 down 10 up. Ethernet wired to gaming PC and work laptop. Rock solid.
Downspeed is better at work but it being WiFi there and shared with many people it still will suck despite being enterprise Cisco and Unifi hardware on two different networks.
But something else that matters (possibly not so much in the US, but definitely in many other countries) is mini internet 'brown outs', where there's a sudden internet drop out for just a few seconds. I don't know what statistic would be good for measuring that. But when it happens during a meeting it's quite annoying and noticeable. In some parts of the world they seem to occur about once an hour, although YMMV.