Insights: Vodafone and Nokia Bell Labs Successfully Test L4S Internet Standard on a Passive Optical Network

In April 2024, Vodafone and Nokia Bell Labs successfully tested a new Internet standard called L4S (Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable Throughput). This standard enables a new congestion control mechanism for capacity-seeking applications, whilst reducing network latency, jitter and packet loss. This enables the network to know when traffic is congested; allowing it to scale down traffic to eliminate congestion.

In the tests, Vodafone and Nokia Bell Labs simulated a heavily congested fibre-to-the-home broadband connection over Wi-Fi, with the companies successfully reducing latency from 550 milliseconds to 12 milliseconds. When testing usage with an ethernet cable instead of Wi-Fi, the latency dropped further to only 1.05 milliseconds.