Why latency increase

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Starlink Internet Update. Best Satellite Internet Providers. Get Faster Satellite Internet. How Does Fiber Internet Work? For most of us, latency isn't a big deal. But for gamers and satellite internet users, latency can make online activities a drag.

Here's what you need to know about it, plus how to fix high latency. Latency, also called ping, measures how much time it takes for your computer, the internet, and everything in between, to respond to an action you take like clicking on a link.

But if you game or use satellite internet, latency can have a big impact on your online experience. This delay between the in-studio news anchor and the reporter is the same as the latency you experience online. Ideally, your latency would be zero milliseconds—but chances of this happening are lower than chances that we find a secret alien base on the dark side of the moon. Or you can skip ahead. You may have heard your fellow netizens mention lag, ping, or ms.

All of those terms also refer to latency. Latency is affected by several factors: distance, propagation delay, internet connection type, website content, Wi-Fi, and your router. Distance is usually the main cause of latency—in this case, it refers to the distance between your computer and the servers your computer is requesting information from. For example, if you live in Madison, Wisconsin, and you visit a website hosted by a server located in Chicago, Illinois, the response time of the website should be pretty quick.

But if you live in Miami, Florida, and try to access that same website hosted by a server in Chicago, the response time will be slower. This is because your request has to travel 1, miles to the Chicago server and back to you in Miami. This brings us to propagation delay: this is how long it takes for your data packets to reach that. Propagation delay is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to how much latency you experience. Your internet connection type can also play a role in how high or low your latency is.

For the most part, DSL, cable, and fiber internet tend to have lower latency, while satellite internet tends to have higher latency. Ever clicked on a link and waited several minutes for the website to load far too many GIFs, ads, or large images? Yup, you just experienced latency thanks to someone plastering The Office memes all over their Angelfire page. If a website is home to lots of large files, like HD images or videos, or multiple third-party ads the horror , your web browser has to download all of those files and ads to show them to you.

Wi-Fi is great, yes, but your wireless signal is more susceptible to noise, meaning your data packets likely need to be re-sent, or retransmitted, if they become lost. Wi-Fi also has to jump through a few more hoops, like encryption protocols, to travel back and forth from your computer.

And usually, those wireless signals fade, or lose strength, over distance faster than an Ethernet connection. Some modern routers come with a feature called Quality of Service QoS. By enabling QoS, you can tell your router to prioritize certain traffic over others. By signing up, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Latency is a measure of how much time it takes for your computer to send signals to a server and then receive a response back.

Bandwidth measures how much data your internet connection can download or upload at a time. You can think of bandwidth like a straw. The regular straw is like low bandwidth. Just like a plan with higher bandwidth lets you download a whole lotta internet goodness with no er, few problems. And, on the other hand, high latency can also create a bottleneck that reduces your effective bandwidth—at least until those delayed data packets get through.

Any latency at ms or lower is considered decent. Even at ms, you can play most online games without much frustration. You can also reduce signal interference from other household appliances like wireless speakers, microwaves and mobile chargers. This can help the wireless signal travel a more direct route to your device. Bandwidth-heavy sites like Netflix, YouTube and downloads severely affect your ping rate and latency. Close any you might have running as this can impact your gaming performance.

Reducing the number of devices you have connected to the WiFi can help. The more devices connected to and using the WiFi, the more bandwidth is required. You could even put your devices on Airplane Mode while you game. Playing on a server in your country or side of your country can significantly decrease your ping. The closer the server is to you, the better. A router that has been on and in use for a while can become strained. Restarting your router can help to refresh your internet connection and can improve latency.

If you're a Gigaclear customer, you'll have a Linksys router and can learn how to restart it here. Old routers can affect your connection strength, speed and reliability. A router optimised for gaming can be the best choice. Gaming routers have special features designed to enhance all the conditions needed for gaming including internet speed, ping rates and latency.

One particular feature is Quality of Service QoS , which allows you to prioritise the internet traffic on your console so you can get the best gaming experience. This ensures packet loss is kept at a minimum within the network. The amount of time a packet sits in a queue is referred to as queuing delay and the number of packets waiting to be processed is referred to as a buffer. As the number of packets increase, so too does the length of the buffer, which consecutively contributes to network latency.

Of course, this may be an oversimplification of complex networking events and there are a multitude of other factors that can cause latency. Either way, the idea is that latency significantly affects application responsiveness and the primary contributing factor to latency is distance. Applications which appear highly responsive on a local network may perform terribly when deployed on a wide area network once distance is introduced. Though it can never be reduced to zero, as long as applications are developed to handle it , we can keep a step ahead of latency.

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