The difference between latency and speed of an internet service provided by ISPs?
In: Technology
Speed is how much data you can get per second.
Latency is how long it takes that data to get to you.
A van full of external hard drives that drives the data across the city to you is an extremely high bandwidth connection – say it has 100 TB worth of drives in it, and takes an hour to get to you. That averages out to 222Gb/s! That’s fantastic compared to most connections. Except for you’re waiting an hour every time you try to load a new webpage.
Latency matters most for gaming and live video or meetings, where you can’t just build up a buffer of data. For things like streaming movies, players buffer some data so that even if it takes time for more to come in, you don’t notice because it keeps smoothly playing the data it already has.
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