Router latency
Since latency is the measurement of time it takes a packet to travel from place to place, and the underlying fiber and copper networks they traverse handle packets at the speed of light, the bottleneck and latency causing portion of the network are the routing points. In IP, packets are routed from their origin to their destination through a series of routers. Each packet has a source and a destination address which is stored in a header. A router receives a packet of data then holds it long enough to open the header and read the destination address, and possibly makes changes to the header depending on network congestion, before sending it on to the next router. The processing speed of the router governs how quickly this takes place. Therefore the efficiency of the routers deployed on a carrier network will impact latency.
