5G Promised Sub-10ms Latency. Reality Delivers 20-50ms. Here's the Fix.

Every 5G marketing deck promises sub-10ms latency. And technically, the air interface delivers. The 5G NR radio link between your device and the gNodeB achieves 8-12ms round-trip. But no user experience lives on the air interface alone. End-to-end, real-world 5G latency lands at 20-50ms. The gap is not a radio problem. It is a content delivery architecture problem.

Where the Milliseconds Actually Go

To understand the gap, trace a single HTTPS request from a 5G device to an origin server and back. Every hop adds latency that the air interface cannot reclaim:

Steps 1 through 3 are the carrier network. They total 11ms and are already highly optimized. Steps 4 through 6 are the content-fetch chain. They add 20-45ms of latency that has nothing to do with 5G radio performance.

What Carriers Actually Deliver Today

Real-world P50 measurements from major US carriers confirm the gap between marketing and reality:

Even Verizon's mmWave, the fastest commercial 5G deployment in the US, cannot consistently break 30ms end-to-end. T-Mobile's standalone architecture gets closest to the theoretical floor, but still spans a wide range depending on content origin distance.

The Fix: Deploy Cache Intelligence at the MEC Edge

The solution is straightforward once you identify the bottleneck. If steps 4-6 add 20-45ms, eliminate them. Cachee deploys directly at the Multi-access Edge Compute (MEC) layer, inside the carrier network, between the UPF and the internet breakout. Content never leaves the carrier edge for 94-98% of requests.

Cachee MEC Path: The Optimized Waterfall

Waterfall Comparison: Traditional vs. Cachee MEC

Side-by-side, the difference is stark. The traditional path wastes 20-45ms on content retrieval that Cachee eliminates entirely:

Predictive Pre-Caching: Serving Content Before It Is Requested

Eliminating the content-fetch round trip is only half the story. Cachee's AI prediction engine analyzes traffic patterns, user behavior signals, and temporal access models to pre-stage content at the MEC edge up to 30 minutes before it is requested.

This means the L1 cache hit that takes ~0ms in the table above is not a lucky coincidence. It is a deliberate prediction. The AI models continuously learn:

• Temporal patterns -- which content surges at which times of day, day of week, and in response to external events
• Spatial locality -- which MEC nodes serve which user populations, and what those populations consume
• Content velocity -- how quickly new content becomes popular and when existing content decays
• Session continuity -- predicting the next request in a user session based on navigation patterns

Why This Matters Now

The applications that 5G was built to enable -- real-time AR/VR, cloud gaming, autonomous vehicle coordination, live sports streaming, industrial IoT -- all require true sub-15ms latency. At 30-50ms, these applications stutter, buffer, or fail entirely. At 10.5ms, they work as designed.

The 5G radio layer has done its job. The content delivery layer has not kept pace. Cachee bridges the gap by bringing intelligent caching to the one place it matters most: the MEC edge, inside the carrier network, milliseconds from the user.