What is Network Latency and How to Improve It? [2023 Guide]

Hey there!

Let me walk you through a detailed guide on everything you need to know about network latency in 2023.

I‘m sure we‘ve all experienced laggy videos, slow loading websites, and unresponsive applications at some point. While frustrating, these issues usually boil down to a single culprit – network latency.

But what exactly is latency, what causes it, and how can we reduce it? Read on as I break it down for you!

What is Network Latency?

Simply put, network latency is the total time taken for data to make a round trip between two points.

It refers to the delay between the moment you click or request something online to the moment you get a response back. Latency is measured in milliseconds (ms).

For example, when you click a link to load a web page, here is what happens behind the scenes:

• Your computer sends a small data packet request to the web server requesting the page.

• That server receives your request, processes it, gathers the page data and assets, and responds back with the page contents.

• This response data packet travels through various networks and routers to reach your computer and render the page.

The total time taken for this entire request-response transaction is known as latency.

So in simpler words, latency is the round-trip delay for data transfer over a network. I hope this helps explain what network latency means!


While latency and ping are sometimes mistakenly used interchangeably, ping refers only to the time taken for a data packet to reach the server from your computer.

Latency is the total round trip time, which is twice that of ping.

Now that you know what latency means, let‘s look at what factors cause high latency and slow internet.

What Causes High Latency?

There are a number of potential causes for increased latency and lags in internet speed:

1. Physical Distance Between Users and Servers

The greater the physical distance data packets have to travel, the higher the latency. Your local data center will have lower latency than servers in another country. The speed of light and geographical distance adds unavoidable delay.

2. Network Congestion and Bottlenecks

When too many users try to access the same server or route simultaneously, bottlenecks occur. This is like a traffic jam, where data gets backed up, leading to higher latency. Peak hour internet usage and bandwidth-hungry apps like video streaming can congest networks.

3. Wi-Fi and Wireless Networks

Wi-Fi and cellular networks involve more latency than wired networks. Wireless transmission of radio signals naturally has some lag, which gets compounded by interference and congestion. Physical obstructions and walls further hamper Wi-Fi signals.

4. Outdated Hardware and Infrastructure

Old network gear, legacy cabling, low-grade routers, dated server hardware, and insufficient network capacity bottlenecks traffic flow, inducing higher latency. Upgrading to latest standards like 5G, DOCSIS 3.1, and Wi-Fi 6 enhances speed and reduces lag.

5. Suboptimal Routing

Sometimes your ISP‘s network takes an inefficient path for traffic between endpoints. This adds excess hops, delays, and latency. Intelligent route optimization is needed to avoid this.

6. Overloaded Servers

A server overloaded with traffic and requests will respond slower. Insufficient processing capacity, outdated specs, inefficient app code, database bottlenecks all contribute to increased latency.

7. Client-Side Device Issues

Low-powered computers and smartphones, dated network adapters, interference-prone Wi-Fi antennas, bandwidth contention from other apps, outdated operating systems, lack of caching and other client-side inefficiencies can hamper network latency.

As you can see, there are numerous potential factors affecting latency, right from the actual network to the client and server infrastructure. Identifying where exactly the bottleneck is occurring is crucial to address it effectively.

So now that you know the common latency causes, let‘s move on to measuring latency accurately.

How to Measure Latency for Network Diagnostics

You‘ve probably heard the popular saying – "You can‘t improve what you don‘t measure". This applies perfectly to latency as well.

Here are some of the top ways to effectively measure your network latency for diagnostics:

1. Ping Tests

A simple ping test sends a small request packet to a domain or IP address and measures the precise round-trip time in milliseconds.

Ping is built-into Windows command line (ping command), macOS Terminal (ping command), Linux, smartphones, and easily available via online tools like Geekflare.

Repeated pings help you find average latency and detect any sudden spikes too. However, ping only reveals the base request-response time, not the full network routing path.

2. Traceroute

Traceroute maps out the complete path your data travels through the various networks, routers, and junctions between your device and the destination server.

It identifies each intermediate hop along with the latency at that point. This helps pinpoint exactly where latency spikes are occurring – whether it‘s your ISP, the website‘s hosting provider, or some network junction in between.

Windows has a built-in tracert command, while Linux has the traceroute command for this. The reporting looks like this:

tracert example.com

Tracing route to example.com [192.0.2.1]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     4 ms    5 ms    3 ms  router1.isp.net 
  2     8 ms    7 ms    6 ms  core1.isp.net 
  3    14 ms   19 ms   11 ms  transit1.core.net
  4    53 ms   39 ms   45 ms  peer1.cdn.com
  5    43 ms   47 ms   44 ms  192.0.2.1

Trace complete.

As you can see, the latency at each hop is clearly visible.

3. Speed Tests

Speed tests like Fast, Speedtest, and Geekflare Speed Test measure real-world latency from your device to the nearest test server location.

This checks the fully loaded latency factoring in your internet service provider‘s network and local infrastructure. Repeated tests at different times of day can reveal peak congestion times.

4. Monitoring Software

Specialized network monitoring tools like SolarWinds NPMD can continuously track latency across complex enterprise environments.

They provide historical reporting, trend analysis, baseline threshold alerts, and help quickly identify any latency anomalies.

5. Website Monitoring

Services like Uptime Robot and Pingdom can remotely monitor your website‘s uptime and performance from multiple global locations.

The latency stats they provide help assess your website speed and pinpoint geographic regions you need to optimize for lower latency.

Now that you know how to measure latency, let‘s get into the good stuff – actually reducing latency!

How to Reduce Latency – 10 Optimization Tips

While latency cannot be eliminated fully, leveraging the following tips can help minimize lag and speed up your internet:

1. Use Local Servers and CDNs

By localizing servers physically closer to your users, the physical distance latency reduces. Migrating servers to cloud data centers in key regions helps.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) like Cloudflare and Akamai have edge servers globally to cache and serve content from the nearest location.

2. Upgrade Networking Hardware

Consumer-grade Wi-Fi routers, switches, and old cabling can drag down performance. Upgrading to latest-generation gear like Wi-Fi 6 APs, Multi-Gig switches, CAT 6A cables, and SD-WAN routing improves latency.

3. Tune the TCP Stack

TCP optimization using optimal window scaling, Selective Acknowledgment, congestion control algorithms like BBR, and other kernel tweaks reduces latency for TCP connections.

4. Enable HTTP/2 and HTTP/3

The newer HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 protocols offer big latency improvements over old HTTP/1.1 sites by allowing multiplexed streams over a single TCP connection. The QUIC protocol goes further. Migrating websites to these new standards really helps.

5. Choose Low-Latency ISPs and Backbones

Specialized global internet backbone providers like Cogent optimize routing to offer the least hops and lowest congestion between regions. Choosing ISPs that peer directly with such backbones is advisable.

6. Limit Unnecessary Server Requests

Browser caching, compressed images, minified code, and eliminating any unnecessary redirects avoids server round trips and reduces latency. Stress test sites using Loader.io to identify and eliminate inefficient requests.

7. Application Code Optimizations

Refactoring inefficient app code and queries, using asynchronous logic, adding more computing resources, and balancing loads reduces application latency. Profile code to identify and improve slow functions.

8. Incorporate Buffers and Allowances

For real-time media like games and live video, build in sufficient latency tolerance into the business logic. This compensates for real-world network delays.

9. Prioritize Traffic

Leveraging QoS capabilities in routers, SD-WAN, and Ethernet switches to prioritize key apps and deprioritize recreational traffic prevents queuing delays.

10. Local Equipment Upgrades

Eliminate old network adapters, upgrade Wi-Fi antennas, use SSDs instead of HDDs, add more RAM and CPU power to improve performance of latency-sensitive apps. Replace CAT5 cables with CAT6A for lag-free networks.

These 10 tips cover optimizing latency from the edge to the core of any network.

Now that you know how to reduce latency, let‘s analyze the business impact of latency.

The Tangible Business Impact of Latency

Before digging into the optimization techniques, it‘s crucial to understand why latency matters so much, especially for modern digital businesses.

According to real-world studies, here is how latency hurts key metrics:

• Amazon realized every 100 ms increase in latency reduced profits by 1%. Google saw a 0.74% drop in revenue per slowdown.

• Akamai found a mere 100 millisecond delay in online retail website load times could result in a 7% loss in conversions.

• For JP Morgan, a stock trading platform latency variance of just 500 microseconds could make a difference of millions of dollars daily.

• An Adobe study revealed that 53% of mobile site visitors will abandon a page that takes over 3 seconds to load. Every 1 second delay over 10 seconds leads to a 7% loss in conversions according to Akamai.

• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory calculated for VoIP and video conferencing apps, 150 ms one-way latency led to increased user dissatisfaction. Gaming apps fared even worse above 100 ms ping rates.

• NASA found their satellite ground crews experienced fatigue and reduced situational awareness when their mission control communications lagged over 500 ms consistently.

As you can see, milliseconds and microseconds matter much more than you probably realized!

Latency directly impacts revenue, conversions, user engagement, productivity, and operational efficiency for today‘s digital businesses. Especially for industries relying on real-time apps, large data flows, and millisecond precision – high latency is totally unacceptable.

This underscores the importance of monitoring and optimizing latency across networks, apps, and infrastructure. The payoff for shaving off latency is huge.

Key Takeaways and Conclusion

We‘ve covered a lot of ground discussing network latency – from understanding what it is and how it occurs to measuring it accurately and reducing it.

Let me summarize the key takeaways:

• Latency refers to the total round-trip delay for network data transfers and is measured in milliseconds.

• Distance, congestion, outdated hardware, routing issues, Wi-Fi, overloaded servers etc. commonly cause high latency.

• Ping tests, traceroute tools, speed tests, and monitoring software help measure latency for insights.

• Upgrading to modern network infrastructure, efficient connectivity, CDNs, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 migration, TCP stack tuning, QoS prioritization, code optimizations, edge computing etc. can minimize latency.

• Every millisecond of latency impacts revenues, conversions, user experience, and productivity materially.

I hope this detailed guide gave you a solid understanding of latency and equipped you with actionable tips to boost network speed and performance in 2023. Feel free to reach out if you need any help optimizing latency – I‘d be glad to help!