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When we install service for new customers – they often tell us that Netflix, web browsing, and gaming “just feel faster” using JackRabbit. We often see Netflix load times speed up from 30 seconds to 3 seconds, even in cases where their previous ISP offered more bandwidth. How is this possible? The answer is some smart software we developed based on decades of research.
Most internet providers focus solely on bandwidth (Megabits-per-second, or Mbps), because it is the simplest metric to advertise. But in addition to offering high bandwidth, JackRabbit also delivers Whole-Home WiFi and low-latency under load (bufferbloat). Achieving optimal performance in these multiple metrics is the key to an internet connection that feels fast, stable, and responsive.
Most ISPs provide customers a single WiFi router capable of covering around 1500 sqft. Past that range, performance often degrades significantly – causing WiFi performance issues in the far ends of the home.
We take a more proactive approach – providing our customers with WiFi 6E Mesh WiFi systems. This allows us to deliver thorough WiFi coverage across every room of the home.
Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data transmitted over an internet connection in a given amount of time. Usually this is measured in Megabits-per-second. Latency is delay, and can be thought of as the time it takes a message sent from your device to reach its destination, plus the time it takes to receive a response back. Latency is measured in milliseconds (ms).
Bandwidth mostly impacts how long it takes to download or upload large static files (game release downloads, video editing files). Performance for everything else we do day-to-day on the internet (video streaming, VoIP, conference calling, gaming) – all comes down to Latency, and Latency under Load (bufferbloat).
Surprisingly, bandwidth does not impact performance as much as advertisers would lead us to believe. Here is an excerpt from the recent research paper Understanding the Metrics of Internet Broadband Access: How Much Is Enough?
Above about 20 mb/s, adding more speed does not improve the load time. The limit on the load time is the latency to the servers providing the elements of the web page.
The world’s largest Content Distribution Network, Cloudflare, has confirmed this pattern using anonymized statistics of the data flowing across their network worldwide.
Internet researchers with the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group have corroborated this in their recent research paper, Latency Explained.
Web page load time is largely determined not by throughput, but by two other factors: how long a network round-trip takes, and how many network round-trips are required.
The average household uses just 5 Mbps of bandwidth during peak usage hours, and only 2.5% of residential internet users use more than 32 Mbps during peak hours. While advertisers for major Internet Service Providers promote increasingly high-bandwidth plans, they completely neglect latency – which is what actually determines internet speed for most daily tasks.
The less delay that a network or application has, the more “responsive” a service will feel to an end user. The more delay (or lag), the worse it will feel.
Critically, however, reducing delay meaningfully improves all existing user applications.
We see this particularly with online gaming, which uses less than 1 Mbps in each direction, but demands very stable, low latency. Recent consumer research confirms that latency is more important than bandwidth for online gaming.
Overall, the consistently reinforced takeaway is that latency has now clearly overtaken broadband speed as the focus area for network providers seeking to provide – and guarantee and commercially benefit from – optimum experience in both online multiplayer and cloud gaming.
Many of us take it for granted that it is “normal” for a video call to stutter or disconnect when someone else on the same home network is watching a 4K video. That is actually a symptom of Bufferbloat – the undesirable latency that results from network equipment buffering too much data. Connections with high Bufferbloat have lower perceived responsiveness. Cable and DSL internet services suffer from significant Bufferbloat, which can make these connections feel slow even when speed tests show normal bandwidth (Mbps).
JackRabbit developed a Quality of Experience solution called LibreQoS. This software keeps our customers’ latency and bufferbloat as low as possible, providing a more streamlined internet experience. With LibreQoS, your WiFi calls, zoom calls, and online games are given fair priority when large file downloads or other so-called “bulk” tasks are occurring in the background. This allows JackRabbit to provide a more responsive and “snappy” end-user internet experience than you would find with Satellite Internet, Cable Internet, and even most fiber internet services.
In recent years, internet researchers have come to find that reducing Bufferbloat is crucial for improving internet performance.
Queue management techniques such as Active Queue Management are available that will reduce bufferbloat in network bottleneck equipment by triggering applications to reduce the amount of queuing delay that they cause. This is not theoretical; AQM has been proven to work at scale in DOCSIS and other networks.
In addition, it is also important to have a consistently responsive service where delay stays consistently low no matter how heavily utilized a user’s Internet connection may be and no matter what mix of applications are being used. This might seem like an unreasonable demand — expecting a network to be able to provide consistently low delay even under heavy load — but, as this report shows, this is in fact possible with today’s technology.
Find out if you experience Bufferbloat on your home internet connection using the Waveform Bufferbloat Test.
