Comcast rolls out ‘Ultra-Low Layer’ Tech that could fix the Internet

If you are using Comcast XFinity Internet, your FACETIME calls may be getting better. Instead of looking up the amount of data that your Internet connection can send or receive at once (usually called bandwidth or flow) comes a new upgrade to reduce the time it takes for each package of information to take the trip .

Comcast officially starts rolling the “pioneering new, Ultra-Low Lag Connectivity Experience” to cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, Colorado Springs, Philadelphia, Rockville (in Maryland) and San Francisco. (Passing: Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, The Verge‘s parent company.)

The technology that drives this upgrade is based on a default called L4SIt stands for “low latency, low loss, scalable flow.” My former colleague Mitchell Clark has a thorough explains of what L4S should do, but the intention is that technology can significantly reduce latency, so things like video games are smoother and video calls feel more like talking in real life without awkward delays and breaks.

L4S pulls this off by giving Internet packages an indicator that lets them know if they have come in congestion or queue along any of the hops on their trip between a user and whatever they connect to. If there is a delay, the devices can begin to adapt to stop to make the overload worse – and possibly eliminate it completely.

As Mitchell explains, it cannot bend physics laws to make data travel faster than the speed of light, but it can reduce the extra delays in the middle that have slowed down your connections. While the bandwidth upgrades we have seen over the years from call to broadband have increased the amount of transferred information, this change will actually make the Internet feel faster for once.

Comcast says you will initially see the improvements with low latens with Facetime, Nvidia’s GeForce now, “Many Games” on Steam and “Apps on Meta’s mixed reality head that will support this technology.” Apple, Nvidia and Valve all cooperated with Comcast During its attempt of the technology, and Apple has had support for L4S built into its devices since iOS 17 and MacOS Sonoma.

Comcast also notes that the technology “will expand to any additional content and application providers who choose to utilize the new open standard technology for their own products.”

I haven’t tried the technique myself, so I can’t personally talk to how the latency improvements feel in practice. But according to Comcast spokesman Joel Shadle, during the trials, “we were able to reduce our work latency – latency under normal conditions in the home when people use the Internet – by 78 percent”, which means Comcast customers “should expect to see significant improvement.

When it is “fully implemented,” Comcast says its low-latency tech will be available for “All XFinity Internet customers.”