Scott Petty
Vodafone CTO
6 minute read
22/07/2019
Latency. If you’ve ever live-streamed a football match and heard the neighbours cheer before you saw the goal, you’ll know about latency. If you’ve ever watched an interview via live satellite broadcast where the gap between each question and answer seems to last forever, you’ll know about latency.
The chances are you’ve also been feeling the pain of latency at work too, though you might not call it that. If so, you’re going to love 5G, not only for its speed, but for what I think is its real superpower: its ability to reduce latency.
A lot of the current 5G media buzz seems to confuse latency with speed – and understate its importance. So in this blog I want to share some thoughts on what latency is, how it impacts the performance of your business and how 5G can eliminate it.
If speed is how fast a car can go, latency is how well it reacts when you put your foot down. Or think of speed as Usain Bolt’s race time, and latency is his gun reaction time.
Definition of latency
The delay between initiating an action and something happening as a result
5G will bring with it a new technology called ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC) and it’ll make life much smoother at home, at work and everywhere in between. These five business benefits reveal what a business without latency looks like:
You know that awkward lag on live broadcasts and video conferences, where people speak over each other, communication is stilted and the whole thing is dissatisfying and distracting? While your clients and prospects probably understand why it happens, it’s not making you look particularly slick and it still feels like a distant second to real face-to-face.
The low latency inherent in 5G will transform our virtual interactions with customers, turning them into real-time exchanges, feeling much more natural, whether we’re in the office or on our mobile.
According to the Office for National Statistics 50 per cent of the UK workforce will work remotely by 2020. The quality of sharing and interacting with colleagues in a virtual capacity increasingly becomes more important. With a significant drop in latency, 5G will transform the delivery of real-time HD video connectivity. Team meetings will feel more human, training will feel more immersive.
Because remote working will work better, recruitment won’t be about co-location any more, it’ll be about being a well-connected, network of resources. Hirers will be able to adopt a whole new perspective on the size and reach of the talent pool available to them. This gives businesses a huge opportunity to secure the best talent regardless of location.
Online video is already an important marketing tool but with 5G making latency and buffering a thing of the past, it’s going to be much easier for businesses to use video to deliver a wide range of rich, tailored content. We’ll also be able to make better use of video – with hi-resolution, VR and AR set to make content more engaging, innovative and accessible across all devices and platforms.
Today’s VR headsets require a cord and a powerful processor to be any good at all. 5G releases both of these requirements allowing content to be streamed back and forth between the cloud (where the processing is done) and the headset or wearable directly, without any latency problems.
In the world of VR, you need latency of less than 7ms; headset users experience nausea when latency is over 18-20 ms. With 5G’s sub-5 or sub-2 ms latency, you can get live 3D video to your fully wireless headset and experience events in real-time - kissing goodbye to motion sickness. This makes VR applications much more viable. Expect to see a surge in virtual demos, showrooms and immersive learning experiences.