What is latency & how does it impact my office connection?

Have you ever found yourself stuck in a situation where the website won't just load? How about when you are sending an attachment and it's taking forever to load. Or maybe you are in a hurry and you immediately need to acquire your customer ticket information - and it won't just load. These painstaking situations are recurrent and you are likely to have faced such issues. While various factors are contributing to such issues, the most common of them is High Latency. Latency directly impacts any business based on the internet as well as their subsequent operations. So, what exactly is latency and why does your ISP keep mentioning it?

Defining Latency

Latency can be defined as the total time taken by a data packet transmitted from its source node or a single node back to its source. There might be a multitude of factors that affect latency issues but the foundational one amongst them is the kind of Office Internet you have employed. For example, Satellite internet is known for high latency because of its longer round-trip travel time and also because the data transmitted travels across thousands of miles into space. Since latency revolves around speed as well as the quality of the devices used, the data traveling speed significantly affects latency.

Why does it matter?

To surmise an answer to this inquiry - Latency affects your internet speed. People often confuse it with bandwidth but bandwidth is the amount of data that transmits over a connection in a leased amount of time. But even though they are different components by definition, there is an impacting relationship between them both.

Higher latency impacts the Internet for Business since it will translate into slower speed, choppy streaming, and poor audio output for VoIP calls. In general, if your ISP is not able to produce lower latency, it will also impact your Office connection.##BlogVASBanner##

How does it impact your office connection?

As discussed already, latency determines the speed of your internet and if that's slower than you had expected, you will be facing a lot of issues. Here's an overview of the problems you might be facing:

• Loss of productivity

  Let's say that you have appointed a team of analysts to release a new product. Their first instinct would be to use your internet to find readily available resources about your company. But if your team discovers that the task is taking longer than it was expected, there will be an anticipated loss of productivity since an hour-long project took them an entire day to complete.

• Compromised reputation

  If your home office deals with e-commerce brands, orders, and case requests will be coming through the day. Now, when your internet is compromised, your reputation will be too since the backend portals will keep crashing. So, without a sustainable IT environment, there will also be delays in your internal operations, preventing you from delivering what was promised - you will just be left to deal with a pouring amount of unhappy customers.

• Loss of resources

  Business transactions are moving online with each passing day. Slow internet equals delays which translate to longer waiting periods, something customers of your business won't be welcoming if the issue is recurrent. There is a higher chance that your customer might opt for your competitor's service which will be a loss of your resources and revenues.

How can you reduce latency?

Latency issues can't be fully dissolved but you can find ways to decrease them by opting for various choices, with one of the primary choices that can make a significant impact being your choice of ISP. And, ACT Enterprise is here to assist you in making an informed decision with their business-grade and high-end internet connectivity. Get in touch to know more about the packages available and how you can reduce your home network latency.