I must've missed something.... (Destiny)

by stabbim , Des Moines, IA, USA, Tuesday, July 05, 2016, 17:05 (3156 days ago) @ Kahzgul

It is certainly possible that the guy with Universal Remote is not lag switching and just has some kind of weird 20 Mbps down / 0.1 kbps up connection, but highly unlikely. The only scenario I can think of it old school satellite internet where you get sat data down but your upstream is still a 56k modem. They certainly exist, but it's pretty doubtful anyone with a current gen console would be suffering through those speeds (let alone uploading video over the phone like that).

That all makes sense if you're operating under the assumption that their connection is in a steady state like this all the time, where the upstream just has incredibly low maximum throughput. But generally, that's not going to be what causes sudden, brief losses of connectivity. Maximum rates are only relevant to lag if something is causing the connection to hit its limit, and generally online games only need a couple hundred kbps (though I admit, I haven't investigated what Destiny uses). People with perfectly reasonable speed plans have trouble, and it could be due to momentary heavy traffic (either on the end-users home network, or just somewhere along the way), or something as simple as a shitty modem or wiring. I lived in a place once that had what should have been a good cable connection, but the wiring was crap and sometimes the modem would lose its link. Or to use a weirder case, there are people who have wireless systems acting as the last-mile connection from their ISP. In those cases, the radio at the ISP tower is typically much stronger than the one at the customer end, and yes, when there are issues it will tend to affect upstream more than downstream.

To try to be 100% clear, I'm not saying lag switching wouldn't look like this. It probably would. I'm saying we don't have enough information to determine that it definitely IS lag switching. Only that that is one explanation which could fit the profile.

As an aside, the satellite setup you're thinking of is HughesNet. Back when I used to work for a wireless ISP, they were our main competitor. Really our only competitor in some places. They're still in business, although apparently their latest tech has ditched the phone line for upstream and gone to two-way satellite. FYI on that, though, if someone were using HughesNet, they would have major latency issues all-around, not just upstream. I tested a satellite connection once (fully satellite, down and up), and the latency was horrendous. Like 700-800ms round-trip. And that's constant (due to the distance it has to travel), not just sometimes. I'm not sure you could even play Crucible with that setup.