Ever tried playing Ping-Pong with a three second delay? What about bowling? How about cracking an egg or attending an aerobics class? 

A Swedish company, Umea Energi, that installs cables for Internet providers in Umea, produced an online video “Living with Lag” to showcase what three seconds really means when we are trying to do something. They said, “You wouldn’t accept lag offline, so why do it online?”

We are on board with Umea Energi’s message – you shouldn’t accept lag online or via your mobile or Web application. The need for speed is real. We do it in a different way though. Regardless of the bandwidth of the broadband service or mobile network, for the sake of meeting the basic needs of your customers, your apps and/or website(s) simply must be fast.

Businesses struggle to meet customers’ instant data gratification for ‘real-time’ or ‘live’ data because they cannot move large volumes of data changes at scale between your business and your customer. Why? Because it is hard to do.

In many cases, organizations solve this challenge by throwing computing power at the problem. However, the trouble is this doesn’t solve bandwidth, performance or reliability issues – it merely defers or ignores the problem. Take bandwidth, just because you’ve added more boxes in the datacenter doesn’t mean that information will get places faster so performance isn’t necessarily improved by computing power.

Instead, by looking at the data you are distributing intelligently, performance can also be improved. Consider my previous thoughts around opening the post. I can open each envelop, scan, process and decide whether it needs to go the bin, needs to be actioned or filed.  I can only read and process one bit of post at a time. The shorter and more concise the letter, the faster I can get through the post and turn my attention elsewhere.

Now apply this to technology. Each time a message is sent to any device, it is opened, processed and an action occurs. Similar to me, your mobile phone can only do this one message at a time. If you can send smaller messages to your users, you can engage that user faster. Performance is improved and issues around bandwidth capacity lessen as you are no longer sending big packets of information across increasingly clogged networks.

We advocate intelligent data distribution i.e. only sending the right data to the right people at the right time. If you can do this, you won’t need to worry about three second delays and the impact they have on your business.