“The connectivity sort of festoons around the continent—it’s all structured to backhaul that traffic to Europe where traffic gets exchanged. And that works. The big penalty you pay there is the distance. That latency for that traffic to go back and forth.”
This is how Principal Analyst Erik Kreifeldt describes the movement of the internet through internet exchange points, connecting people across continents. And when data must travel far and wide to reach a user, you see that L word. Latency.
What is Latency?
All networks experience some amount of latency, and there are technically different kinds. Think of it as the delay. It’s the time between hitting enter and actually getting to your desired destination on the internet. In networking speak, it’s the time it takes for a data packet to go from one node to another.
When the internet gods are on your side, you might not notice the pause between requesting a site and seeing the page load in your browser. But if the data packet in question needs to take a particularly circuitous route—or if data demand is particularly high—we’re more likely to notice a pronounced delay before reaching our intended destination on the internet.
If you’ve ever attended the same Zoom meeting as another colleague in the vicinity, you probably noticed—and were distracted by—the fact that you could hear their real voice a split second before their words came through your speaker. This is latency.
And there’s more than a few reasons for how much latency you experience. This ranges from the type of internet connection used, to spikes in traffic, to wireless interference.
The next time you're furiously refreshing Hulu for the new episode of your favorite show, take a moment to thank latency for the wait.
