Round Trip Time (RTT) Delay in the Internet: Analysis and Trends

TL;DR

This paper analyzes global Internet RTT delays, highlighting how capacity improvements have not proportionally reduced latency, with significant regional differences despite overall trends toward latency reduction.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of current end-to-end latency trends worldwide and compares them to the theoretical minimum latency based on optical fiber speed.

Findings

Latency has decreased over the last decade despite traffic growth.

Significant regional differences in latency persist.

Most regions are still far from the theoretical minimum latency.

Abstract

Both capacity and latency are crucial performance metrics for the optimal operation of most networking services and applications, from online gaming to futuristic holographic-type communications. Networks worldwide have witnessed important breakthroughs in terms of capacity, including fibre introduction everywhere, new radio technologies and faster core networks. However, the impact of these capacity upgrades on end-to-end delay is not straightforward as traffic has also grown exponentially. This article overviews the current status of end-to-end latency on different regions and continents worldwide and how far these are from the theoretical minimum baseline, given by the speed of light propagation over an optical fibre. We observe that the trend in the last decade goes toward latency reduction (in spite of the ever-increasing annual traffic growth), but still there are important differences between countries.