Bountiful Bandwidth Lagging Latency

Recently, I came across an interesting article published in 2004 comparing growth, reasons and handling imbalance between bandwidth and latency. Excerpts below are from Latency Lags Bandwidth, Recognizing the chronic imbalance between bandwidth and latency, and how to cope with it. By David A. Patterson, Communications of the ACM, October 2004/Vol. 47, No. 10.

In the time that bandwidth doubles, latency improves by no more than a factor of 1.2 to 1.4.

Reasons for Bountiful Bandwidth

“There is an old network saying: Bandwidth problems can be cured with money. Latency problems are harder because the speed of light is fixed – you can’t bribe God” – Anonymous.

Moore’s Law helps bandwidth more than latency.
Distance limits latency.
Bandwidth is generally easier to sell.
Latency helps bandwidth.
Bandwidth hurts latency.
Operating system overhead hurts latency.

Coping with Lagging Latency

Caching: Leveraging capacity to help latency.
Replication: Leveraging capacity to again help latency.
Prediction: Leveraging bandwidth to again help latency.

Marketing Latency Innovations

The difficulty of marketing latency innovations is one of the reasons latency has received less attention thus far.

Perhaps, we can draw inspiration from the more mature automotive industry, which advertises time to accelerate from 0-to-60 miles per hour in addition to peak horsepower and top speed.