John H Woods

UK

IT

For video purposes, latency is fairly unimportant. As long as you can download the stuff faster than you can watch it you can buffer it to ensure you don't run out of video.

For gaming purposes, latency is everything. The actual volume of information moving around is pretty tiny, but it's pretty frustrating to bend down to pick up a weapon only to look up and see someone who was at the end of the road is now running off with it.

For working from home it depends what you do: if you download large files, work on them and send them back, you need high bandwidth (_BOTH_ ways). But if you remote to a host machine on site, you need low bandwidth but gaming-like responsiveness.

What we need is to be able to see HONEST latency and bandwidth (up and down) figures from ISPs, and to choose packages that reflect our needs.