5G, Robotics, AVs, and the Eternal Problem of Latency

Engineers will tell you that for an orchestra to rehearse remotely, it would need at least 500 megabits per second to avoid throwing off the synchronicity of a concert performance. But that’s using high bandwidth as a proxy for latency. Why not work on reducing latency directly? Because it’s hard. Nonetheless, at the cutting edge of network engineering, researchers are working on it. And not for orchestras. Autonomous vehicles, factory robots, virtual reality, piloting drones, robotic surgery, and even advanced prosthetics all require latency to get down toward one millisecond. So says our guest today, Shivendra Panwar, author of an article in November’s IEEE Spectrum magazine, “Breaking the Latency Barrier.”