Who Really Cares About Latency?

Specifically, which applications and network operators have latency on their minds?

Well, content providers, gaming companies, financial enterprises, and cloud service providers, to name a few.

TeleGeography Senior Analyst Paul Brodsky recently joined experts from Ciena and Angola Cables for an hour-long discussion centered around Connecting to Africa with Low-Latency Services.

For his part, Paul mapped out the market landscape as it relates to latency. Here are some nuggets of wisdom from his presentation:

• Content providers are funding new lower-latency routes to better meet their bandwidth needs.
• Some online games (first-person shooter, for example) are particularly sensitive to latency because they require nearly instantaneous feedback.
• Shortest-path cables help enable high-frequency trading.
• The cloud is not ubiquitous and latency may greatly impact your cloud experience.
• Cable routes are becoming more direct between data centers to avoid drop-offs. And new cables—like Australia-Oman—are being developed with direct routing to cut down latency.

Want more than just the highlights? You can re-watch the full discussion over here.