Latency on fiber connectivity to Internet

[Donald]

I know in most cases when a company goes from old technology (pair of copper wire) to new technology (fiber) they install the latest hardware and often leapfrog other companies who installed the same technology earlier. So it would seem FIOS has been leapfrogged by my local phone company (Consolidated Communications).

I bought 25Mb in fiber service in NY and the latency is 7ms. In DE I have 75Mb FIOS and latency is 21ms.

Same phone in both cases doing speed test. Same speed test application. Using the Google VPN option that comes with Google Fi.

I am sure there are factors I have not thought of.

In DE it's a Verizon modem/router/WIFI.

In NY it's a Consolidated modem/router and a TP-Link router/WIFI.

My first thought was the latency in DE was high due to the Google VPN. But that is also in use in NY with very low latency.

Ideas/comments.

 

[wwillson]

If the latency with no load is steady around 21ms over a couple hour timeframe, then it's almost certainly propagation delay. We see this often when there is a long tail circuit and/or your traffic is being carried a distance back to a internet POP where your packets can be routed to a peer. If your traffic is jittery without load, then that opens the door on a whole lot of other possibilities. Troubleshooting what is causing the delay/jitter is sometimes part skill and part magic.

 

[cpayne5]

First thing you should do is control your test. Make sure you're testing against the same endpoint. Names can resolve to different IPs, based on proximity and IPs are not necessarily unique.

Once you have a known endpoint and experience large variations in latency between your two services, then I'd do a traceroute to dig into why. Likely, there will be a single hop in the path of the "slow" location that will be responsible for the increased latency you're seeing. My money is on your provider's first peering point to your destination and not necessarily within its own network.

 

[Rand]

Might simply be less customers/node or newer equipment on their end.

 

[SEMI_287]

My local phone companies new fiber is nice and quick. Verizon stopped all DSL and doesn't offer fiber here.

 

[Andrew1972]

The better test is comparing on ethernet each location with a computer. There can be latency differences dependent on the wifi portion of your router.