Latency in 5G and Its Impacts

Though 5G has become a reality for businesses and consumers, many of them are not aware of the impacts and uses of 5G. Some people think that only the speed of the network in 5G matters but Latency is one of the major requirements for 5G productivity. Latency can affect network productivity to a large extent. Low Latency rate can change a way of accomplishing tasks that we had never imagined during 4G and other telecommunications eras. Low Latency is a crucial part of network connectivity for the biggest and smallest businesses ensuring that everything is running placidly. 

It makes sense if you think about 5G telecommunications. Don’t you? 

Need for low Latency in 5G

Now the question may arise in your mind what is latency and why do we need it? 

Latency is a measure of the time taken to send the data from users to the end-point of the servers. If you know about low latency rates, then it is necessary to learn why it is important for any business. Low Latency means the minimum time to process in the network. Thus, we can say low latency means quicker response in any network. 

Everyone knows that more time in the network means low connectivity. Using low latency, connection loss and time reduces. Also, if there is high latency in the network, it impacts the decrease in bandwidth and also affects the productivity of an organization. 5G technology provides an excellent low latency rate of under 5 milliseconds. That means, it opens many new possibilities for doing services.  

Speed vs Latency

Many of you might think that the internet speed should be better to load work faster. Let’s suppose that the speed of your vehicle is faster than others but the traffic lights, local traffic, and many more factors balance the same. In the same way, the Internet speed is also influenced by latency rate, which means the time taken from the user’s request to the server’s response. Hence maintaining latency is more important than higher speeds as it has the biggest impact on the business. 

High speed and low latency can result in better performance of the system in any business. Though Latency and speed are very different concepts but are very close and important to each other. 

Factors that affect the Latency Rate

• Distance – As the gap increases between the end-to-end connection between the servers, then the response time will be slower as compared to less distance between the computer and the server. Hence, distance can be the main cause of the Latency rate.
• Internet Connection – The latency rate also depends on the type of internet connection. For example, Fiber connection, DSL, and cables can have a low latency rate but internet via satellite can have a high latency rate.
• Physical issues – It includes a router and Wi-Fi cables that can affect the latency rate in a physical context. Let’s say, if many people and devices are connected from the same router at the same time, then the router doesn’t support the same internet speed it can provide which increases the latency rate.
• Construction of websites – The website that has huge content from many websites may perform slowly as compared to other websites. That makes different latency rates depending on the construction of the website.

• Memory space – Latency is the fundamental measure of the speed of the internet. Low memory can affect the internet speed and creates a problem for the operating system.

How to improve the latency rate?

The slow network speed can affect businesses to a large extent when time matters a lot. A higher latency rate can increase the web page loading times which causes negative impacts on communication and make impatient to users.  

To improve the latency rate, some methods are as follows: – 

Speed and bandwidth – For a faster network connection, the speed should be high at least more than 3mbps. To play online games, video calls, and live streaming high bandwidth is required otherwise it can impact the performance. 

Router – If your router has been running for a long time, then restart it. Everyone knows that signal flows wirelessly from one end to other, so place the router in a good place with better connectivity. 

HTTP/2 – It takes a single path to make all requests, reduces the time to travel, and hence latency rate affects less. 

CDNs – To improve load time, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) can be used as it reduce the data transfer amounts between the server and the client which reduces the latency rate. 

Conclusion

5G is getting advanced day by day and interconnecting the whole world without any limitation and moving towards an era of new services, which means latency becomes a crucial part of the network management system like speed. If 5G will be able to achieve a single digit milliseconds range of latency, then it will open entirely new possibilities across the world.