Will Latency Be the Next Rural/Urban Digital Divide?

The US is at risk of experiencing a new type of rural/urban digital divide, said stakeholders at the RTIME conference. “Latency is becoming the new currency,” said Brent Legg, executive vice president of Connected Nation, a non-profit focused on carrier neutral internet exchange points. The root of the problem is that only 57 US cities have internet exchange points, requiring providers serving customers outside those areas to transport traffic to one of those 57 cities to exchange traffic with the network operator and/or content provider at the opposite end of the connection. This adds latency, which means that internet users outside the 57 cities will have an inferior user experience in comparison with those in the 57 cities. And this issue will become increasingly important as applications that require low latency gain in popularity. “We can’t have one type of experience in urban areas and a different experience in rural areas,” said Legg.