What is latency? And why is it bad?
Latency is hard on applications like games, telephone call, video conferencing, or anything that requires “real-time” interactivity. For instance, it can determine the outcome of any game. For example, in a First Person Shooter, if the connection is “laggy”, and both players shoot each other at the exact same time, person A’s bullets may hit person B before person B’s bullets hit person A. In a telephone call, high ping times would be experienced by a lag between callers, creating a situation that may require people to say “over” after they finish a sentence. Same is true of video conferencing. Satellite connections are especially prone to this problem, (see above), with ping times often in excess of 3000mS, making gaming, VPNs, conferencing, phone calls, and many other applications impossible to use. Wireless connections like Applegate Broadband’s, are very good for gaming, or any other real-time application.
