mtaht writes that the bufferbloat fixes across the entire network have shown a 90% improvement in working time and jitter. The Cumulative Distribution Function chart is going to die. Did anyone notice? Did any other ISPs use AQM tech? How many of you are running smart queue management?
The official expects the new standard to have less latency. For home users, the article links to a page that recommends a routers that has been updated to use one of the Smart Queue Management algorithms such as cake, fq_codel, PIE.
There is a proposal for Low Loss Scalable Throughput currently under discussion at the IETF in the Transport Area Working Group. It is possible that this approach will result in working latencies of less than one millisecond. We may see the beginning of a shift to sub-5 millisecond working latency in a few years as the IETF sorts out the best technical path forward through experimentation and consensus-building. This is likely to improve the quality of experience of existing applications and also create a network foundation that will allow entirely new classes of applications to be built. We can think of usable augmented and virtual reality, but these are applications we know about today. When the time to access resources on the Internet is the same, or close to it, what happens? What if the assumptions that developers make about networks are no longer needed? This is a central assumption in the design of many existing applications. If that assumption changes, we can potentially rethink the design of many applications and all sorts of new applications will become possible. That is a big deal and exciting to think about.
When most people have 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, or eventually 100 Gbps connections in their home, it is easy to see that connection speed is not the only factor in their performance. We're entering an era where low working latency will become the next big thing that differentiates various internet access services and application services/platforms. Factors like high uptime, proactive/adaptive security, dynamic privacy protection, and other new things will likely also play a role. There's a lot of exciting things happening.
