[Bloat] Terminology for Laypeople

[Livingood, Jason]

Like many of you I have been immersed in buffer bloat discussions for many years, almost entirely within the technical community. Now that I am starting to explain latency & latency under load to internal non-technical folks, I have noticed some people don’t really understand “traditional” latency vs. latency under load (LUL).

As a result, I am planning to experiment in some upcoming briefings and call traditional latency “idle latency” – a measure of latency conducted on an otherwise idle connection. And then try calling LUL either “active latency” or perhaps “working latency” (suggested by an external colleague – can’t take credit for that one) – to try to communicate it is latency when the connection is experiencing normal usage.

Have any of you here faced similar challenges explaining this to non-technical audiences? Have you had any success with alternative terms? What do you think of these?

Thanks for any input,
Jason
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