In our digital times, people want their online experience to take place instantly. Regardless of whether the person is watching the live stream of a football match, conducting a video call for work purposes, or just playing any online video game, any delay will severely disrupt the process.
The desire for instant data transfer has resulted in the digital world transforming into the age of real time internet. At the center of this instant connection stands a key technical challenge: reducing latency to provide a truly lifelike experience.
Also Read: How Hyperscalers Like AWS & Azure Run the Internet?
To understand how this is done, it is useful to define the term “latency”. In general, latency refers to the period of time delay or lag between action and response.
To put it simply, in a live streaming case, latency is the very interval that exists between capturing a frame on the camera and seeing this frame on the screen of the viewer.
While five seconds of delay will not cause any harm while watching a big football match, even a small delay of 150 milliseconds may spoil a live video call or financial transaction.
To make your product highly responsive, you need to move away from the slow data streams and start using specialized equipment and clever data protocols for achieving extremely low latency:
Data in live streams is coded according to strict guidelines, which allows processing of video frames on the spot without having to deal with buffering of files.
The new architectures allow storing all data inside the main memory of your graphics card and avoid even microseconds needed to copy data from one chip to another.
While archived videos are perfect, you should be aware that real-time systems prefer slightly noisy but instant data.
By far the largest hurdle that stands in the way of creating a low-latency network system is distance. If information has to travel all the way around the world before reaching its destination and returning, delay becomes unavoidable.
This is what makes the use of edge systems vital to modern technology. Rather than having applications hosted in one place far away, companies create an entire network of small servers, which are located at the “edge” of the internet, physically closer to the end-user.
A fully immersive internet experience can only be achieved by improving the efficiency of each and every step involved. Thanks to low latency networks and edge networks, the technology industry is making it possible for the web to evolve from an information source with delays into a completely interactive internet.
