Vodafone, Nokia test new tech to eliminate gaming, video lag

Vodafone and Nokia on Wednesday said that they have successfully tested a new internet technology, which could improve the home broadband experience for customers, particularly when gaming or making video calls.

Using a replica fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) link serving a standard laptop over a busy Wi-Fi broadband connection (simulating the worst-case peak load), the two companies were able to reduce the response times, known as latency, when accessing an internet site from 550 milliseconds (0.55 seconds) to just 12 milliseconds (0.012 seconds) while maintaining fast speeds.

The latency was reduced to only 1.05 milliseconds (0.00105 seconds) when an ethernet cable was used in place of Wi-Fi, according to the company.

In the test, Vodafone and Nokia’s research arm Nokia Bell Labs were able to demonstrate the benefits of a new Internet standard called ‘L4S’ to simultaneously maintain a high throughput of data (customer traffic) and low latency, at Vodafone’s laboratory in the UK.

“L4S is an exciting technology with huge potential to achieve this goal, as well as deliver a more interactive and tactile internet experience for our customers,” Gavin Young, Head of Fixed Access Centre of Excellence at Vodafone, said in a statement.

L4S stands for ‘Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable’ throughput.

Backed by the leading Internet standards body, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), this technology tackles queuing delays, which are a significant source of peak latency on the internet and the scourge of most serious gamers.

“These highly encouraging results show that L4S will unshackle any real-time application that would normally be constrained by high latency,” said Azimeh Sefidcon, Head of Network Systems and Security Research at Nokia Bell Labs.

“Videoconferencing, cloud-gaming, augmented reality and even the remote operations of drones would run flawlessly across the internet, without experiencing any significant queuing delays,” she added.