{"id":39449,"date":"2024-09-19T10:18:57","date_gmt":"2024-09-19T09:18:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ispreview.co.uk\/?p=39449"},"modified":"2024-09-19T10:18:57","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T09:18:57","slug":"broadband-forum-push-home-isps-to-adopt-low-latency-l4s-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ispreview.co.uk\/index.php\/2024\/09\/broadband-forum-push-home-isps-to-adopt-low-latency-l4s-technology.html","title":{"rendered":"Broadband Forum Push Home ISPs to Adopt Low Latency L4S Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Broadband Forum<\/a> has launched a new roadmap that they hope will aid ISPs in implementing the new Low Latency, Low Loss and Scalable Throughput (L4S) technology, which has the potential to improve network latency times for popular UK internet activities like online video games, video conferencing, cloud gaming and so forth.<\/p>\n

Network latency<\/strong> is a measure of the time that it takes for a packet of data to travel from your computer to a remote server and then back again (ping). The delay is measured in milliseconds, and modern broadband connections will often have an average latency of anything from around c.4ms to 40ms (what is normal for your connection will depend on lots of different factors).<\/p>\n

NOTE:<\/strong> 1000 milliseconds (ms) = 1 second.<\/div>\n

The shortest time is always best for latency, although the times can be affected by various things, such as the performance of remote internet servers, the connection technology being used, network congestion, peering \/ routing problems and the setup of your own home network etc. But consumers with Fibre-to-the-Premises<\/strong> (FTTP<\/a>) connections can usually expect some of the best latency times of c.2-10ms.<\/p>\n

However, there\u2019s always room for improvement, which is why L4S<\/strong> is now being given more of a push. The new technology is based on the knowledge that the root cause of queuing delay (i.e. when packets wait idly in buffers across the network, for instance in routers and modems, before being forwarded) is in the capacity-seeking congestion controllers of senders, not in the queue itself.<\/p>\n

L4S attempts to move away from the congestion control algorithms that sometimes cause substantial queuing delay and instead adopt a new class of congestion controls, which seek capacity with very little queuing. The new technology introduces immediate congestion feedback from network bottlenecks as soon as data packets begin to queue, which when combined with a scalable congestion control scheme on the sending hosts can result in lower latency.<\/p>\n

Companies and operators like Vodafone<\/a>, Apple, Nokia and Intel have been increasingly pushing for wider adoption of L4S since it was specified by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) last year. The Broadband Forum is now establishing a roadmap to help show operators and service providers how to implement L4S.<\/p>\n