How Internet Latency Can Impact your business Performance
July 13, 2022 Internet Latency
One of the basic needs of any business today is high-speed, uninterrupted Internet access. However, all too often, tasks such as uploading a document into an email, or waiting for a website to load can take a long time. While several factors contribute to such problems, the most common delay is due to Internet Latency. Internet Latency directly affect any Internet-based businesses and their activities. But what does latency mean and how does it affect an organizations’ Internet performance?
What is Latency?
Latency is the time it takes for a data packet to be transferred from the source and back to its source. In practice, the time delay between the user’s action and the response of the website or application to that action. For example, latency can be defined as the time between a user clicking on a web page and a web page being displayed by a browser. Many factors can affect the issue of latency, but one of the main factors is the type of Internet that every business uses.
What factors contribute to Internet Latency?
Distance: Geographical distance can increase latency, as the further a device is away from the servers responding to the request, the longer the delay.
Number of hops: The higher the number of hops the data packet has to pass through, the slower it will take to reach its destination.
Congestion: This can occur when a network (or part of the network) or a network node is overloaded with data.
Jitter: This is the variation in latency or time delay between when a signal is transmitted and when it is received over a network. This variation causes disruption in the normal sequence of sending data packets over your network connection.
Packet sizes: Latency is directly proportional to data packet size. So larger packets have higher latencies, which is why, for example, it takes your business longer to send video files or encrypted data.
What effect does latency have on businesses?
Although data on the Internet transfers at high speeds, factors such as distance and latency caused by Internet infrastructure equipment ensure that latency is never completely eliminated. The effects of excessive delays :
Reduce business productivity
Long Internet service latency and longer page load times can reduce the productivity and performance of people in the organization. To justify this reduction in productivity, consider the fact that employees need to search for resources on the Internet to do a job, and due to the high delay of the Internet in loading web pages, instead of one hour, all employees’ working hours are spent doing that work.
Loss of resources and income
Business transactions are moving towards the online network day by day, and many businesses offer their services and products to customers online. Low speed Internet equals latency that leads to longer processing. As a result, if your business is delayed on their website, customers may choose your competitor service, which will result in a loss of your resources and revenue.
How can Latency be reduced?
Whilst Bandwidth is a measurement of the size of a data connection (measured in Kbps, Mbps, or Gbps), this is the physical capacity. On the other hand, Latency is the measurement of speed that data travels across a network (measured in ms). Lower latency equals a faster speed. Internet latency varies based on the type of network connection you have.
For example, both Cable and DSL Internet are shared network connections, meaning you are sharing network capacity in your area with numerous subscribers. This is the reason why there are fluctuations in the bandwidth speeds and Internet latency depending on the time of day, even though you bought a service that was supposed to have higher Internet speeds.
Dedicated Internet Access
With DSL and Cable connections, there are no guarantees on your service for uptime, latency, packet loss, or repair (aka Service Level Agreement – SLA), it is called a “best effort” guarantee. With a dedicated Internet line, for example, Ethernet or Fiber Internet), the connection is dedicated and the bandwidth is not shared, you are the only one using that bandwidth. Internet speeds are always the same no matter the time of day, and service comes with a Service Level Agreement for guaranteed network performance. This is the first factor in Bandwidth vs Latency issue.