New Technology to Lower Latency

There is a new network tool that’s starting to be eased into networks that can significantly lower latency. The new standard L4S (Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput) was released in January 2023. Comcast has started to work L4S into their networks in some of its major markets. They report that the technology can cut load latency at least in half, in some cases bringing the latency under load to close to the ping latency. The real key to making this work is to have the largest content providers build L4S into their networks. For example, a gaming app would need to make sure L4S is enabled at their serving data center to take advantage of the improved latency. If the Comcast trials are successful, it seems likely that a lot of the industry will adopt L4S, and savvy users will avoid applications that don’t use it. There will be an interesting shift in the industry if use of L4S become widespread. A lot of customers have upgraded broadband speeds to get better performance but found that they didn’t see a big improvement. It a lot of cases, the real culprit in bad performance is buffer bloat. If this gets introduced everywhere, customers might find they are satisfied with slower broadband speeds.