Microsoft says transport latency can nullify benefits of 5G

Microsoft wants to be the global wide area network (WAN) for 5G. Victor Bahl, chief technology officer of Azure for Operators, noted that while 5G offers big boosts in speed, those speeds get watered down because “every network operator ultimately depends on the internet at some point.” Bahl said ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) within the 5G New Radio standard is nice; its delay specification can be anywhere from one to four msec on-air latency. Yet he said you have to consider the context of applications, which often are interacting with users, devices and cloud services over long distances. Based on the locations of the source and destination of traffic, according to Bahl, internet latencies can vary anywhere from a single order to several orders of magnitude more than on-air 5G wireless latencies. This high latency can effectively remove all the benefits of the low-latency properties offered via the 5G network. Microsoft would like wireless operators that run extensive national backbones to extend their WANs with Azure. And it would like smaller and new operators that do not have their own national backbones to rely on Azure’s WAN for their 5G networks. Microsoft Azure maintains over 175,000 miles of lit fiber optic and undersea cable systems, covering close to 200 points of presence (PoPs) across 140 countries. The network is connected to many thousands of ISPs.