However, if people can t reach the ambulance or police on the phone when they need to, it s a different story altogether. Adding myriad interactive multimedia services to cable s services suite will only impose greater demands on broadband network management capabilities. These advanced telecommunications services on cable, if perceived as highly reliable and consistent value propositions, stand a very good chance of following the telephony services path. Eventually, these services will become second nature, embedded into our lives as tools upon which we increasingly rely. One issue that you will experience in deploying several of these advanced broadband services is the concept of latency.
Latency can be a confusing term.
In telecommunications and computing jargon, latency generally has to do with the regularity of something, such as the arrival rate of video frames in a video streaming application. If the latency is too high in this case, then the viewer may not perceive full motion video. Minimizing latency for such an application involves the behavior of many functions within the underlying network infrastructure between the source and consumption points. If the source server resides beyond the headend somewhere in cyberspace, then the path between the distant server and the LAN-side port of the headend resident router will be a factor in the quality of the streaming application. The concept of latency is not confined to the network.