"lag" is often understood by non-technical folks, as in "the lag between the time you step on the gas and the time the car actually speeds up".

Some folks who've been exposed to video enough will know about "lag and jitter" (;-))

--dave 

Hi

Yes. "Idle latency"  and "Working latency" make sense.

Note however that if you think of idle latency as sparse ping, then these sparse ping can give unreasonably high values over cellular access (4G/5G). The reason is here mainly DRX which is a battery saving function in mobile devices. More frequent pings like every 20ms over the course of 100ms or so can give more correct values.

/Ingemar

Message: 1
Date: Tue, 11 May 2021 21:26:21 +0000
From: Greg White <g.white@CableLabs.com>
To: Jonathan Foulkes <jf@jonathanfoulkes.com>, "Livingood, Jason"
	<Jason_Livingood@comcast.com>
Cc: bloat <bloat@lists.bufferbloat.net>
Subject: Re: [Bloat] Terminology for Laypeople
Message-ID: <0A5DF790-7A71-4B84-A20B-559A5E0CE65F@cablelabs.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

I recently heard Stuart Cheshire (sort of tongue-in-cheek) refer to “idle
latency” as “the latency that users experience when they are not using their
internet connection” (or something along those lines).

I think terminology that reinforces that the baseline (unloaded) latency is not
always what users experience, and that latency under load is not referring to
some unusual corner-case situation, is good.  So, I like “idle latency” and
“working latency”.

-Greg

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David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
dave.collier-brown@indexexchange.com |              -- Mark Twain