High Latency vs Low Bandwidth - Impact on Web Performance - find out what you need to know to improve your web infrastructure.

1. High Latency vs Low Bandwidth
Impact on Web Performance

2. Low Bandwidth and High Latency
When it comes to running a fully functional website there are certain
Yes’ and No’s. One of the major No’s are certainly Low Bandwidth
and High Latency.
But which one is more fatal and crippling for your site?
Let’s start by explaining what High Latency and Low Bandwidth
actually mean and how do they affect your website’s performance.

3. Bandwidth is just one element of what a person perceives as the
speed of a network. Latency is another element that contributes to
network speed.
The term latency refers to any of several kinds of delays typically
incurred in processing of network data. A so-called low latency
network connection is one that generally experiences small delay
times, while a high latency connection generally suffers from long
delays.
Simply put: Latency refers to the time it takes to initiate a
communication. Bandwidth describes how fast you can get
information across.

4. High Latency Fact #1
For VoIP networks, it is generally accepted that anything over about
150 milliseconds of latency can be a problem.
When latency gets higher than 150 milliseconds, issues will emerge
— especially for fast talkers and rapid conversations.

5. Excessive latency creates bottlenecks that prevent data from filling
the network pipe, thus decreasing effective bandwidth. The impact of
latency on network bandwidth can be temporary (lasting a few
seconds) or persistent (constant) depending on the source of the
delays. Think of latency in terms of a road. The longer the road, the
longer it takes to travel.
Now substitute “higher” for “longer” and you have latency. The higher
the latency, the more impact that can have on load times. From a
pizza delivery standpoint, high latency can have you impatiently
tapping your toes, wondering when the pizza guy is going to arrive.

6. If we stick with the road analogy, you can think of bandwidth as the
wider the road, the more traffic that can travel on it at once.
As opposed to latency, where we don’t want it to be high, high
bandwidth is in fact what we want. Low bandwidth means clogged
traffic and cold pizza.

7. How Latency Affects Browsing
Think about load time and how slower site browsing gets. That’s the
ultimate damage.
Let’s say you are browsing the web on different types of connections.
Here’s how latency would affect your browsing:
1. Satellite Internet Connection (High Speed, High Latency): You
would click a link on a web page and, after a noticeable delay, the
web page would start downloading and show up almost all at once.

8. 2. Theoretical Connection (Low Speed, Low Latency): You would
click a link on a web page and the web page would start loading
immediately. However, it would take a while to load completely and
you would see images load one-by-one.
3. Cable Internet Connection (High Speed, Low Latency): You
would click a link on a web page and the web page would appear
almost immediately, downloading almost all at once.

9. All of the above can contribute greatly to bandwidth issues in a
network, and should be done only when there is only light network
traffic. Large file transfers or data streams within a network should be
placed on a separate network, in order to avoid bottlenecking other
users.
Bandwidth is important when you have a lot of data to send/receive and
it doesn’t really need to be real-time, such as transferring large
amounts of data to an off-site backup. (You don’t really care in what
order the data arrives or how quickly the other side can respond, you
just need all the data to get there.)

10. High Latency Fact #2
Xbox games are sensitive to latency. For example, in may
collaborative combat games, participants are required to battle
players from other locations.
Low latency on your network is everything when it comes to beating
the opponent to the draw. If you and your opponent shoot your
weapons at the exact same time, but your shot takes 200
milliseconds to register at the host server and your opponent’s shot
gets there in 100 milliseconds, you die.

11. Quality of Service (QoS)
QoS (Quality of Service) refers to a broad collection of networking
technologies and techniques. The goal of QoS is to provide
guarantees on the ability of a network to deliver predictable results.
Elements of network performance within the scope of QoS often
include availability (uptime), bandwidth (throughput), latency (delay),
and error rate.

12. Conclusion
While low latency and high bandwidth is the ideal to strive for, high
latency has a deeper impact on load times than low bandwidth. At
low latencies, data should transfer almost instantaneously and we
shouldn’t be able to notice a delay. As latencies increase, we begin
to notice more of a delay. You can measure the latency between
your computer and a web address with the ping command.
Latency is always with us; it’s just a matter of how significant it is. At
low latencies, data should transfer almost instantaneously and we
shouldn’t be able to notice a delay. As latencies increase, we begin
to notice more of a delay.

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inquiries.
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