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The world is becoming increasingly aware of 5G as it is rolled out across the globe in 2020. As the fifth generation of cellular technology, 5G touts increased speed and connectivity, promising to connect people and devices to each other more than ever before. One of the key components that is consistently quoted regarding the availability of 5G is “low latency”. But what does that actually mean? We’re going to cover the meaning of latency, technologies responsible for improved latency in 5G, and what industries actually rely on low latency.
What is latency?
Latency is a measurement of time between an action and a response. In computing, latency is usually described as the amount of time between making a request (clicking something on a website) and receiving a response (seeing the page fully loaded). You usually see latency mentioned regarding gaming, websites, and business applications.
Companies invest considerable sums of money to achieve lower latency. High latency can negatively affect their bottom line if a website loads too slowly or a streaming application isn’t smooth. This usually comes in the form of CDNs, caching, or other various methods that physically route the request to a server closer to the requestor (client) or make copies of the data available that reduce the querying…
