What is Latency
Latency is generally considered our connection to be of good quality if it has a high download speed. And also. if the download speed is high, we also think of ourselves as more than lucky. But there’s another critical factor in measuring the quality of your connection that we don’t usually take into account – latency.
When you’ve noticed, when you measure your internet connection speed, all the pages that do tell you what Ping is. Today we’re going to walk you over what this setting is, what it precisely measures, and why in some cases, it’s more important than speed to assess your connection status.
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Table of Contents
What is Latency Work?
The speed of your connection is the bandwidth you have available, and the higher the rate, the more data packets it can receive. Like the main road, the more lanes, the more traffic will flow per minute, and with two lanes, more people will reach their destination than with one in the same period.
Instead, latency is the exact time it takes for a packet to stay transmitted within the network, the time it takes to receive a package from the server. What works is the immediacy of the connection. Since we have a latency of 50 milliseconds, this is when it takes to go, for example, from Google’s servers to our computer.
Going back to the analogy from before, we can have a three-lane highway with hundreds of cars driving. But that doesn’t mean seeing traffic in real-time. It can take a few milliseconds between the passage of a vehicle and the moment we see it give way. And that is precisely the latency.
Ping is used to measure latency, measured in milliseconds (or ms) when the local connection is slow to connect with a remote computer on the IP network. Therefore, when you run a speed test, the first thing the web will do is measure the ping. And then, it will give you the upload and download speeds.
There are different approaches to measuring your ping depending on your operating system. The simplest way is to use the same pages we recommend to measure your Internet connection speed.
Where is the Most Important Latency?
Ping or latency is especially important in situations where immediacy. Communication with a server is vital to our business. A classic example is video games because if your ping is high, you will have a lag. And it will take time to get to your screen what is going on in an online game. And when the game is, for example, shooting, it can make a difference in reacting to certain situations.
When you have a video conference, it can also be essential to have a good ping to get around. It is pretty painful to have one of these conversations with a high delay. And you have to wait for your message to reach the other person and then for their response to reach you.
And then there is the world of vehicles and connected cities. Imagine driving a car remotely or using another system from your home. In these cases, the ability to react is vital to avoid accidents, so it is essential to have latencies as low and close to real-time as possible.
Also, when one of these devices uses artificial intelligence with algorithms that need to get data from the network. Good latency is vital for making decisions as quickly as possible. Imagine that one of those cars driving alone takes too long to break into a dangerous situation because of its delay. This can have dire consequences.
In short, your connection speed is all you need to know. So you will be able to watch a movie on Netflix well or download a file in no time. But in cases where it will interact with other elements through the network. Latency and ping become two vital factors in measuring the quality of the connection through which you will make it.
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