To ixel I agree, what a few people dont realise or perhaps more than a few that a higher latency does slow things down, try browsing a website in asia and it feels slow thats because of the latency.
I don't go outside the google homepage of .co.uk and what sites in asia are you looking at
sorry I don't get this Fastpath fasination that seems to hook the younger internet users they seem more concerned about lower pings than the overall modems well being on there connection, call me a fuddy duddy if you like but on interleaved I can do the same stuff as a fastpath user so what is this all about ?
I think you are confused, fastpath doesnt only affect asia sites, it affects 'everything'. I used asia sites as an example of seeing the affect of latency on performance. Actually asia sites fastpath wont have much of an impact as the latency is already high so an extra 10-30ms on a already 300ms latency isnt a huge deal, but an extra 10-30ms latency on a 20ms base latency is a big deal.
You need to understand how tcp slowstart etc. works to realise latency affects performance on everything.
eg. before I got switched I was maxing out my upload to a german server of mine, but when I got switched to interleaved I only maxed out at about 14mbit/sec as the extra latency was enough for the send buffers to get maxed out on the latency.
Also some example's of asia based sites.
square-enix.com
asus.com
You dont have to be an asian to be accessing asian based sites, japanese based companies will host in their own country often.
Latency is also the reason why 3g feels slow compared to fixed line based broadband. A 2mbit adsl connection will be way faster than a 6mbit 3g connection. The reason is although the speed capacity is higher, because of the latency the speed takes much longer to ramp up. In addition when doing things like loading a web page small packets have to be bounced back and forth initially to start the process, with high latency these small packets take longer.
Interleaving (with sufficient recieve buffers) wont affect bulk downloading, as the speed eventually ramps up and will be fast, but otherwise almost everything else is affected.
so here I am 6am 11 days after been put on interleaved with very low error rates still no fast path. DLM way too conservative in recovery.