The tower still has to ping the rest of the network to find the service you were requesting to in the first place.
If total latency ~ 500 ms, phone-to-tower is maybe 50ms of that in 4G. Even if it's down to ~1ms, total latency is only down 10%.
Not a networking expert so maybe I'm missing something here. Perhaps better use of CDNs could make this much faster?
E.g. https://aws.amazon.com/wavelength/, but if you’re big enough I’m sure you can make more interesting deals.
How did you come up with 500ms for comparison? A fast-paced videogame with that sort of latency would be unplayable. 100ms is still considered bad and 50ms is considered acceptable.
Each individual network call is faster tho, good point.
Maybe 50 microseconds, not 50 milliseconds. 1/1000th of what you assumed.
Towers are typically up to a few miles away in dense areas; they don't work well beyond 15-20 miles from the cell phone.
Waves go 186,000 miles (or 300,000 km) per second. Assuming a 10 miles distance from phone to station, it takes ~25 microseconds to do the trip, which is ~50 roundtrip.
So, in other words: latency is NOT affected by 5G much.