When it comes to the internet, we know you can look things up on it. You can play games, and we use it for our jobs. But aside from that how does it really work? More importantly, how important of a role does server latency play in all of this?
To describe it simply, you can think of a highway. Latency is every single car in front of you when you’re in a traffic jam.
Each car represents an online gaming server in the way of faster internet for you. Every server that your message passes through is making your message take that much longer to get to its source. In a casual setting, an instance of this would be if you were playing a game in Germany, but the servers are located in North America. Your in-game information has to travel overseas through multiple routers in order to reach its destination, then the host server has to convey the information back to your computer which takes just as long. Now, in real-time, this can only be a couple of seconds, but if you had a serious business transaction that had to go through by a certain time, or you had a hard deadline for an assignment that had to get through to Japan, you might be dealing with a much bigger issue.
