The Quiet Plan to Make the Internet Feel Faster
upstart writes:
A few months ago, I downgraded my internet, going from a 900Mbps plan to a 200Mbps one. Now, I find that websites can sometimes take a painfully long time to load, that HD YouTube videos have to stop and buffer when I jump around in them, and that video calls can be annoyingly choppy.
In other words, pretty much nothing has changed. I had those exact same problems even when I had near-gigabit download service, and I'm probably not alone. I'm sure many of you have also had the experience of cursing a slow-loading website and growing even more confused when a "speed test" says that your internet should be able to play dozens of 4K Netflix streams at once. So what gives?
Like any issue, there are many factors at play. But a major one is latency, or the amount of time it takes for your device to send data to a server and get data back - it doesn't matter how much bandwidth you have if your packets (the little bundles of data that travel over the network) are getting stuck somewhere. But while people have some idea about how latency works thanks to popular speed tests, including a "ping" metric, common methods of measuring it haven't always provided a complete picture.
The good news is that there's a plan to almost eliminate latency, and big companies like Apple, Google, Comcast, Charter, Nvidia, Valve, Nokia, Ericsson, T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom, and more have shown an interest. It's a new internet standard called L4S that was finalized and published in January, and it could put a serious dent in the amount of time we spend waiting around for webpages or streams to load and cut down on glitches in video calls. It could also help change the way we think about internet speed and help developers create applications that just aren't possible with the current realities of the internet.
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