Concentration of distances in high dimension is an important factor for the development and design of stable and reliable data analysis algorithms. In this paper, we address the fundamental long-standing question about the concentration of distances in high dimension for fractional quasi $p$-norms, $p\in(0,1)$. The topic has been at the centre of various theoretical and empirical controversies. Here we, for the first time, identify conditions when fractional quasi $p$-norms concentrate and when they don't. We show that contrary to some earlier suggestions, for broad classes of distributions, fractional quasi $p$-norms admit exponential and uniform in $p$ concentration bounds. For these distributions, the results effectively rule out previously proposed approaches to alleviate concentration by "optimal" setting the values of $p$ in $(0,1)$. At the same time, we specify conditions and the corresponding families of distributions for which one can still control concentration rates by appropriate choices of $p$. We also show that in an arbitrarily small vicinity of a distribution from a large class of distributions for which uniform concentration occurs, there are uncountably many other distributions featuring anti-concentration properties. Importantly, this behavior enables devising relevant data encoding or representation schemes favouring or discouraging distance concentration. The results shed new light on this long-standing problem and resolve the tension around the topic in both theory and empirical evidence reported in the literature.

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