When most people talk about network performance, the first thing they think of is bandwidth, how much data a link can carry. But real network engineers and operators know that speed alone doesn’t define experience.
What truly determines performance is latency, the time it takes for data to move from one point to another. And one of the biggest factors influencing latency is your IP transit provider, the backbone through which your traffic travels.
At WISPAPALOOZA 2025, Aaron Rodriguez from Shift Hosting highlighted how networks that understand and optimize both latency and IP transit routes are the ones leading the industry today.
What Is Latency and Why Does It Matter?
Latency is more than just a technical number. It’s what defines how responsive an application feels, how smooth a video plays, or how fast a website loads.
You can have high bandwidth, but if latency is high, everything still feels slow. For ISPs and infrastructure providers, that translates into lower customer satisfaction and customer loss.
The reality is simple: every millisecond matters, in gaming, voice calls, streaming, and enterprise connectivity alike.
As Aaron emphasized, it’s not about who has the biggest network; it’s about who moves data the fastest and most efficiently.
Why Has Latency Become So Critical Today?
The internet is no longer a single connected web, it’s a complex ecosystem of data centers, CDNs, cloud platforms, and peering fabrics.
Every additional hop between networks adds delay. As real-time applications like cloud gaming, video conferencing, and AI-driven edge workloads grow, latency is no longer a background metric, it’s a core business factor.
Even a difference of 10 milliseconds can shape how users perceive performance. That’s why the best networks today design around minimizing latency first, not as an afterthought.
How Does Peering Help Reduce Latency?
Peering is one of the most effective tools for cutting latency. It determines how your network reaches others, and how close you are to your users and the content they consume.
The key takeaway: not all peers are equal. The best-performing networks analyze traffic patterns and selectively peer where it matters most.
What Role Does IP Transit Play in a Reliable Network?
Peering gets you efficiency, but IP Transit gives you reach, it’s the service that connects your ASN to the global internet.
Your transit provider defines how your routes propagate, how your traffic exits the network, and how resilient you are to failures or congestion.
Choosing the wrong provider can lead to:
- High latency due to inefficient routing paths
- Packet loss and instability
- Poor redundancy and weak route propagation
In contrast, the right transit partner builds a foundation of reliability, scalability, and performance.
When choosing an IP transit provider for your AS, consider these five key questions:
- How extensive is their global reach and peering ecosystem?A provider with broad global presence and deep peering reduces hops and latency.
- Do they prioritize low-latency routing?Some carriers optimize for cost, others for performance. Ask for latency maps or routing samples before committing.
- Can they support multi-homing and redundancy?For reliability, connect to multiple Tier 1 or Tier 2 providers instead of depending on a single one.
- Are they transparent and responsive?Good support is part of good connectivity. You want a partner who can help troubleshoot routing performance in real time.
At Shift Hosting, this is our objective. We build low-latency IP Transit by carefully choosing upstreams and peers, minimizing unnecessary hops, and maintaining backbone diversity.
That’s how we deliver predictable routing and stable performance for ISPs, hosting providers, and data-driven enterprises.
How Can You Measure and Improve Latency?
Optimization begins with visibility.Before you can improve latency, you need to measure it, accurately and continuously.
Tools like Traceroute, MTR, Smokeping, and BGP monitoring reveal real-world routes and help identify inefficiencies.
Key metrics to monitor:
- Average latency (RTT); the baseline response time
- Jitter; variation in latency, critical for VoIP and streaming
- Packet loss; indicates congestion or poor routes
- Path consistency; whether your routes remain stable over time
Correlating these metrics with your routing data shows where optimization is needed, whether at the transit, peering, or internal routing layer.
What Does Shift Hosting Bring to the Table?
At Shift Hosting, our network isn’t just about capacity, it’s about performance and reliability.
Each PoP (Point of Presence) is designed to maintain consistent, low-latency connectivity through smart routing and carefully chosen upstream providers.
Our IP Transit services are built for ISPs, Host providers, and enterprises that need consistent uptime and measurable routing efficiency.
This is what Aaron shared at WISPAPALOOZA 2025, that Shift Hosting’s vision is built around one principle: milliseconds matter.
What Are the Key Lessons from WISPAPALOOZA 2025?
If one thing was clear from this year’s event, it’s that latency defines competitiveness.
The ISPs and networks that win aren’t those with the largest infrastructure, they’re the ones that make every packet move smarter and faster.
As Aaron put it, performance today is about strategy, not size. And that strategy starts with smart peering and reliable IP transit.
Why Do Milliseconds Define the Future of Connectivity?
In the modern internet, every millisecond is a business advantage.As demand for real-time connectivity grows, latency will become the ultimate differentiator between networks that deliver, and those that lag behind.
At Shift Hosting, we’re focused on building an internet that moves faster, connects smarter, and never stops improving.
If you’re building or scaling your AS and want to explore how low-latency IP transit can strengthen your connectivity, reach out at sales@shifthosting.com
