DENVER — Most of the envisioned metaverse won't be possible if 5G and Wi-Fi 6 and 7 don't meet the promise of getting latency near single digits, Meta Director of Engineering Dan Rampton said at this week’s ConnectX event in Denver. 

The difference in audio at 115 milliseconds of lag is perceivable, according to Rampton. The threshold for video is slightly higher, between 150 and 200 milliseconds. “We notice that people start interacting with those products differently at that point, and start to talk more slowly, the engagement goes down,” he added. 

But some of the more advanced products planned for the metaverse will need consistently low lag. “For the real future products that have us either excited or concerned – depending on where you're at – 25 milliseconds is the target we're going after,” Rampton said.  

As more metaverse experiences become available, it becomes clear where “the system breaks down.” For multi-person interactions, like Meta’s fast twitch ping-pong game, the latency involved is sometimes doubled. 

“The crux of the problem here is it’s connected with two users. You might really get a great connection at home with 10 milliseconds, but actually it's 20 minutes to try to play these games,” Rampton said. “You'd still traverse the entire network to get there.”

Rampton estimated that in the U.S. there are around 15 – if not fewer – interconnection points where every major network operator is accessible. “That's kind of startling when you think about it. That is how not ubiquitous our network to network to network to network connectivity is in the United States,” he added. 

The group of Meta apps has grown to roughly 3.5 billion users monthly. “This comes with a large set of challenges, and big responsibility,” Rampton said. “But the truth is that this is something that you will have many companies developing. There actually won't be just one metaverse.”

To grow the network ecosystem, investment in neutral colocation facilities is a critical opportunity to solve latency challenges. Servers, GPUs, and other equipment needed to bolster network-to-network connectivity can be placed in these shared facilities.

“Pretty soon we're talking about something in every state, if not multiple in every metro area,” Rampton said. “These are not just good ideas. I think they're actually cost conscious ideas in some ways when you look at it going forward.”

Meta is hoping to jumpstart industrywide collaboration on infrastructure needed to boost network connectivity — not just in the U.S., but globally. “No one person built the internet,” Rampton said. “I think to actually make the catalyst happen, we probably need to lock arms as an industry and decide that this is a good idea and work toward this thing together.”