Is latency equivalent to RTT?

Wed May 14 14:31:53 UTC 2003

On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 03:01:06PM +0100, Michael.Dillon at radianz.com wrote:
> 
> Has it become common usage to define latency in an IP network as the round 
> trip time in that network?
> 
> I've always considered latency to be a one-way measure of delay and RTT to 
> be the sum of the latencies in both directions. When I tried to find 
> something to back up this view, I discovered that a number of companies 
> define latency as equivalent to RTT in their SLAs.

Could this be because customers believe that RTT more closely
represents a network characteristic that they (or their customers)
actually need? Perhaps they find it easier to digest like this
because they're already familiar with the concept (because someone
let them have 'ping').

-- 
Andrew Bangs
andrewb at demon.net