5G’s secret weapon will be low latency, empowering next-gen VR and gaming

As the 2018 Mobile World Congress wound down this week, next-generation 5G wireless technology was clearly the show’s biggest story, promising dramatically faster data speeds. But 5G’s secret weapon will actually be ultra-low latency, a concept that’s easily understood but hard to market. Verizon, Vodafone, and Huawei have spent the past month demonstrating how low latency will radically improve wireless video, video games, and VR, focusing on just a few of the industries 5G will transform over the next few years.

Latency means responsiveness — think of it as the time gap between a request and a response. When you finish entering a URL into your phone’s web browser, the page takes seconds to display because of two factors: the time it takes for the request to be acknowledged (latency), then the time it takes to send all of the page’s text, images, and video to your phone (data rate).