Why we face a lag while watching a live sport going on overseas?
Hello there! While we’re learning Data Communication we come across various reasons that affect the efficient transfer of the data packet. For instance lets consider a scenario :
The Olympic Games are taking place in Japan. Being a decorated sports event it’s watched throughout the world. If an Indian guy and German guy tune their TV antenna and start watching the ongoing game live, the time delay received by the German guy will be more and that for the Indian guy will be less .For understanding this we need to learn about delays in Data Communication.
In our scenario the delay that is affecting the transmission of the data is the Propagation Delay. So let’s learn about it.
The Propagation Delay :
It’s the time taken by a data packet to travel from the sender to the receiver.
It can be calculated using the formula :
Propagation Delay = D/s
(D= Distance between the sender and receiver , s= Propagation speed of the wave signal)
From formula we get that it is directly proportional to the distance(D) and inversely proportional to the speed(s).
So, getting back to our scenario the German guy is far away from Japan as compared to India, hence the distance D has larger value and results in greater value of propagation delay.
So, in a nutshell, even if you are watching a live game, there is a delay depending on the distance between you and the venue of the live game.
Thank you!