Europe Spends 3.5M Euros To Fight Network Latency

When it comes to networking, a lot of people focus on the bandwidth side of the issue, but latency is sometime a much bigger problem (especially on wireless networks). Network latency is that the that it takes an information packet to go from one computer to the next. For example, a typical web page which is hosted in your town can be accessed in 54ms. The same page from the same server can have a latency of 800ms if accessed from the other side of the globe. Latency can have different forms, and is not only a matter of distances every network has some level of latency, even your home network.The European commission has selected a number of researchers from several European countries (Sweden, Norway, Belgium, France) to devise a better way to transport data, without having to upgrade existing infrastructure. This is called the reduce internet transport latency, or RITE project. The old “throw money at the problem” is not always a practical solution. Instead, the team will focus on better data packets management, and they may be able to provide recommendations that could be used by every network manufacturer going forward, at least, that that’s the hope.

The group expects that if it has recommendations, the industry will be eager to listen, simply because “everyone benefits” says a researcher. If successful, this may affect your gaming session, your Skype calls, and if just about every gets a little bit faster on the internet, the whole world would gain immensely in “productivity”. Who doesn’t want a faster Internet?

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Computers, Web
Tags: internet