Comcast Just Gave Six Cities an Early Look at Lag-Free Internet

If you live in Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Colorado Springs, or Rockville (Maryland), Comcast might have just given you a sneak peak at the internet of the future. In collaboration with Apple, Meta, Nvidia, and Valve, the service provider is currently rolling out a new open standard called “L4S,” which seeks to drastically reduce how lag works online, and make gaming and video calls much smoother.

What is L4S?

Short for “Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput,” L4S wants to make this internet feel faster— not by upping bandwidth, but by making data transfer more efficient.

Right now, your internet service provider, or ISP, sends data to you in the form of packets. These are small chunks of information that, in worse-case scenarios, have to queue up to make their way to you. L4S adds an indicator to packets that are currently stuck in a queue, allowing the network to address the congestion, and perhaps outright end it.

Essentially, the idea is to clear the roads for your internet traffic, so it doesn’t take as long to get to or from your house. This should make video chats feel a lot more like sitting across a coffee table with someone, or gaming feel a lot more like sharing a couch with your teammate. In a statement to Lifehacker sister publication CNET, Comcast said that its L4S trials saw working latency reduced by 78%.

How do you use L4S?

L4S is open-source, so Comcast doesn’t have any special rights to it, but actually using it still involves getting a bunch of big companies to agree—hence the slow rollout, and hence why Comcast is the first to really implement it at scale.

Perhaps the biggest issue with L4S is that it requires app developers to support it alongside internet service providers. That means that Comcast’s version is starting with just a few use cases—L4S will work with FaceTime, Nvidia GeForce Now, and supported apps on both Meta Quest headsets and Steam. The latter two companies haven’t exactly published a list of which apps or games work with L4S, but if your next Counter-Strike 2 match feels smoother, that’d be why.

What are the limitations of L4S?

In a charitable move, the company says L4S will be available to “all Xfinity Internet customers,” but that doesn’t mean there aren’t potential hiccups here. The internet is a two-way (billion-way, really) street, and sometimes, the chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

For instance, if you’re on a FaceTime call with Grandma, and Grandma lives in rural Indiana and uses DSL (no personal experience inspiring this example, I promise), no amount of technical wizardry on your end is going to make her connection better.

Similarly, playing a game alongside teammates who don’t have L4S means you might end up having to carry a little bit, or if the game’s servers are hosted by clients rather than the publisher itself, it could be a moot point—your connection will be at the mercy of whichever player gets picked to host the match.

It’s still early days, but among people using Comcast broadband in the test cities listed above, their interactions with each other might be about to get far smoother. Comcast says it will deploy to “more locations across the country rapidly over the next few months,” while Verizon and Ericsson recently wrapped up a test on using L4S with the former’s 5G network. It’s an optional bonus for now, but the more people adopt L4S as a norm, the more the internet will get smoother for everyone.

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