Dial-up, has better latency, since their is no packet-switching. So it is slow, but not laggy.

hylaride 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Dial-up, has better latency, since their is no packet-switching. So it is slow, but not laggy.

It was laggy as there was buffering and some compression (at least for later revisions of dial-up) that most definitely added latency.

▲

ipython 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Dialup has a ton of latency (100+ms), but little jitter.

	▲	toast0 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If you're dialed up directly, you should be able to get a little bit better latency as you won't need IP, UDP, and PPP/SLIP headers; at modem bandwidth, header bytes add meaningful latency. But data transmission is still pretty slow, even with small packets.

▲

giantrobot 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You're using confusing terminology so you look very wrong. What you mean to say is direct modem-to-modem connections were not laggy because there was no packet switching. This is a true statement.

What the GP comment was talking about was dial-up Internet being most people's exposure to TCP/IP gaming in the 90s. That was most assuredly laggy. Even the best dial-up Internet connections had at least 100ms of latency just from buffering in the modems.

The QuakeWorld network stack was built to handle the high latency and jitter of dial-up Internet connections. The original Quake's network was fine on a LAN or fast Internet connection (e.g. a dorm ResNet) but was sub-par on dial-up.

	▲	kleiba an hour ago \| parent [-]
		And then there was also this: https://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-fa...