Comcast Just Gave Six Cities an Early Look at Latency-Free Internet
If you live in Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Colorado Springs or Rockville, Maryland, Comcast may have just given you a glimpse into the Internet of the future. In collaboration with Apple, Meta, Nvidia and Valve, the service provider is currently rolling out an implementation of a new open standard called “L4S” that aims to radically reduce the impact of latency on customers and make gaming and video calls more efficient. smoother.
What is L4S?
Short for “Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Bandwidth,” L4S wants to make the Internet faster—not by increasing bandwidth, but by making data transfers more efficient.
Right now, your ISP or Internet Service Provider is sending you data in the form of packets. These are small pieces of information that, in the worst case, will have to wait in line to get to you. L4S adds an indicator to packets that are currently stuck in the queue, allowing the network to clear congestion and possibly end it entirely.
Essentially, the idea is to clear the roads for your internet traffic so it doesn’t take as long to get to or from your home. This will make video chats more like sitting at the coffee table with someone, and gaming more like sitting on the couch with a teammate. In a statement to Lifehacker sister publication CNET, Comcast said latency was reduced by 78% in L4S testing.
How do you use L4S?
L4S is open source, so Comcast doesn’t have any specific rights to it, but in reality its use still requires the consent of a group of large companies – hence the slow rollout and hence why Comcast is the first to actually bring it to scale.
Perhaps the biggest problem with L4S is that app developers have to work with ISPs to support it. This means the Comcast version starts with just a few use cases: L4S will work with FaceTime, Nvidia GeForce Now, and supported apps on both Meta Quest and Steam headsets. The latter two companies haven’t released a list of apps and games that work with L4S, but if your next Counter-Strike 2 match feels smoother, here’s why.
What are the limitations of L4S?
As a charitable move, the company says L4S will be available to “all Xfinity Internet customers,” but that doesn’t mean there aren’t potential problems. The Internet is a two-way street (with billions, in fact), and sometimes a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
For example, if you’re on a FaceTime call with your grandma, and grandma lives in rural Indiana and uses DSL (no personal experience inspiring this example, I promise), no amount of technical wizardry on your part will improve her connection. .
Likewise, playing alongside teammates who don’t have L4S means you might have to carry a little bit, or if the game servers are hosted by clients rather than the publisher itself, it might be a moot point – your connection will be at the mercy of the player who is chosen to play the match.
It’s still early days, but among people using Comcast broadband in the test cities listed above, their interactions with each other could become much smoother. Comcast says it will roll out to “more locations across the country” over the next few months, while Verizon and Ericsson recently completed testing using L4S with the former’s 5G network . This is an optional bonus for now, but the more people accept L4S as the norm, the smoother the Internet will become for everyone.