Web pages loading slowly? Video not smooth? The real problem is latency, and the good news is there's a plan to almost eliminate it, with major companies including Apple, Google, Comcast, Charter, NVIDIA, Valve, Nokia, Ericsson, T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom, and more showing interest.

A new internet standard called L4S was finalized and released in January this year, which could significantly reduce the time we wait for a web page or streaming media to load, and reduce glitches during video calls. It also helps change the way we think about network speeds and helps developers create applications that are not possible in the current Internet reality... L4S is short for Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput, and its goal is to ensure that packets spend as little time as possible waiting in unnecessary queues by reducing the need for queuing.

To do this, L4S works to shorten latency feedback loops; when congestion starts to occur, L4S means your device can detect the problem almost immediately and start taking steps to fix it. Typically, this means slightly reducing the amount of data sent, making it easier to maintain good data throughput without increasing latency, which would increase the time it takes to transfer data.

If you really want to dig deeper, you can read the specification document on the Internet Engineering Task Force's website:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9330/

The L4S standard adds an indicator to packets that shows if they encounter congestion while being transmitted from one device to another. If the packet goes through successfully, there is no problem and everything is business as usual. However, if a packet waits in the queue for longer than the specified time, it will be marked as experiencing congestion. This way, equipment can immediately start adjusting to prevent congestion from getting worse or even eliminating it entirely.

Greg White, a technology expert at research and development company CableLabs, believes that L4S or similar standards are "very necessary" when it comes to reducing Internet latency. "This buffering latency is often hundreds or even thousands of milliseconds in some cases. Some early fixes for buffer bloat reduced latency to tens of milliseconds, while L4S has reduced latency to single digits of milliseconds...."

Currently L4S is not widely used in most cases. However, there are also some large companies involved in the development work. About 20 cable modems already support L4S, said CableLabs' Greg White, and several internet service providers, including Comcast, Charter and Virgin Media, have participated in events designed to test how pre-release hardware and software work with L4S. Companies such as Nokia, Vodafone and Google also participated in the event, and it is not difficult to see that the industry is very interested in L4S.

Another factor helping L4S is that it is widely compatible with currently used congestion control systems. Apple paid more attention to L4S at WWDC2023 after adding beta support for L4S in iOS16 and macOS Ventura. At the same time as WWDC, Comcast announced that it was partnering with Apple, NVIDIA, and Valve to conduct the industry's first L4S field trial. This way, content providers can tag their traffic (such as NVIDIA's GeForceNow game streaming), and users in the pilot market with compatible hardware such as Xfinity10GGatewayXB7/XB8, ArrisS33 or NetgearCM1000v2Gateway can experience it immediately.