This past Wednesday, Professor Jeff Prince from Indiana University spoke to us about the difficulties of pricing the intangible: a.k.a. the Internet. He mainly spoke about two aspects that have the potential to increase internet speed: bandwidth and latency. While I had heard the term “bandwidth” prior to coming to this Rose Café, the term “latency” used in this context was completely new to me. In my heat and mass transfer course last semester, we learned about latent heat, which is the heat required to convert a solid into liquid or vapor, or convert liquid to vapor, without a change of temperature. However, I had trouble relating the term from heat transfer to internet speed.
Professor Blalock provided the analogy of a highway. Bandwidth is the number of lanes on the highway–a greater number of lanes promotes less traffic and thus faster travel. Latency is the length of the highway–if the distance between destinations A and B could somehow decrease, the speed at which you would get from A to B would of course increase. Ideally, you want your bandwidth to be as high as possible and your latency to be as low as possible. It is my understanding now that latency is the time delay between stimulation and response. I found this talk particularly interesting because of this introduction of this completely new concept. In comparison with past Rose Cafés, this talk was definitely had more of a technical basis, which was refreshing to me.
I wasn’t able to attend this Rose Cafe, but it sounds as though it was interesting. Your post got me thinking that, though I use it every day, I don’t really know much about how the internet works. I had never heard the term “latency” with respect to the internet and internet speeds before.
It’s also good to here that this was a more technical Rose Cafe. In the past, I’ve felt we had a dearth of technical speakers. Hopefully there are more such Cafes in future.
While I knew a little bit about latency, I find it weird that service providers only market bandwidth to consumers. It’s as if they don’t want consumers to know that bandwidth isn’t the only thing and it’s interesting to see how this will turn out in the future, as to Professor Prince’s research.
Would you rather have a two lane highway that is extremely efficient in getting cars from point A to point B? Or would you rather have a multi-lane highway that can transport say, 150 cars each direction, but in a much more efficient way? It was certainly interesting to see how economics could get heavily involved and I am anticipating the changes it brings to service providers in the coming years.