How Cachee Cuts 5G Latency 65-71% for Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T

5G latency varies significantly across carriers, network tiers, and geographic regions. We modeled Cachee's MEC edge deployment against real-world latency baselines for all three major US carriers. The results: 65-68% reduction in P50 median latency and 67-71% reduction in P99 tail latency, with every carrier dropping below 15ms at the median.

P50 Median Latency: Before and After Cachee

P50 (median) latency represents the typical user experience. Half of all requests complete faster than this number. Today, no major US carrier delivers a median below 28ms end-to-end. With Cachee at the MEC edge, all three drop into single-digit or low-double-digit territory:

The reduction percentages are remarkably consistent across carriers despite their different baseline profiles. This is because Cachee eliminates the same bottleneck in every case: the content-fetch round trip between the carrier edge and the origin server. The carrier's own radio and backhaul latency passes through unchanged.

P99 Tail Latency: Where Cachee Has Even Greater Impact

P99 tail latency is the number that matters for real-time applications. It represents the worst 1% of requests -- the ones that cause visible stutter in AR overlays, dropped frames in cloud gaming, and timeout errors in API calls. Tail latency is disproportionately affected by origin fetch variance, and that is exactly what Cachee eliminates.

Why Tail Latency Improvement Is More Dramatic

Notice that P99 reductions (67-71%) are larger than P50 reductions (65-68%). This is not an accident. It is a structural consequence of where Cachee sits in the network.

Tail latency in the traditional 5G path is dominated by origin fetch variance. When the origin server is under load, experiencing a cold cache of its own, or geographically distant, the content-fetch round trip can balloon from 15ms to 60ms or more. This variance is what pushes P99 to 85-95ms even when P50 sits at 28-41ms.

Cachee eliminates this variance entirely for cached content. The L1 in-memory cache at the MEC edge returns content in ~0ms regardless of what the origin server is doing. No origin load spikes. No geographic distance penalties. No cold-start delays. The P99 collapses toward the P50 because the high-variance component of the path has been removed.

The Variance Compression Effect

• Traditional P99/P50 ratio: 2.3-2.5x (high variance from origin fetch)
• Cachee P99/P50 ratio: 2.2-2.3x (residual variance from radio conditions only)

With Cachee, the remaining latency variance comes almost entirely from radio conditions (congestion, handover, signal strength), which are inherently lower-variance than internet round trips to distant origins.

Full Carrier Comparison

Here is the complete before-and-after picture across all three carriers at both percentiles:

Why T-Mobile Is Best Positioned

T-Mobile shows the strongest results in this analysis, and it is not just because of Cachee. T-Mobile has two structural advantages that compound with MEC edge caching:

T-Mobile's P99 with Cachee (21ms) is lower than every other carrier's P50 without Cachee. That is a generational improvement in consistency.

How Cachee Serves Content Before It Reaches the Core

The key architectural insight is placement. Cachee does not sit at a CDN PoP in a data center across the internet. It deploys at the MEC (Multi-access Edge Compute) layer, inside the carrier's own network, between the UPF and the internet breakout point.

When a 5G device makes a content request:

1. The request traverses the air interface to the gNodeB (4ms)
2. The gNodeB routes through backhaul to the UPF (3ms)
3. At the UPF, Cachee intercepts the request before it exits the carrier network
4. Cachee's AI decision engine determines in 0.5ms whether the content is cached
5. For 94-98% of requests, the content is served from L1 in-memory cache
6. The response returns directly through the carrier network -- never touching the public internet

The request never reaches the carrier core network for the internet-bound leg. It is intercepted and served at the edge. This is fundamentally different from a CDN, which still requires the request to exit the carrier network, traverse internet peering, and reach a PoP that may be many hops away.

What This Means for 5G Application Developers

With Cachee deployed at the MEC edge, developers can finally build for the latency targets that 5G was supposed to deliver:

• Cloud gaming: 9-14ms content delivery keeps total input-to-photon under 30ms
• AR overlays: Sub-15ms asset delivery eliminates registration drift
• Live sports / events: Near-real-time content refresh with P99 under 31ms
• IoT command-and-control: Consistent low-latency response even at P99

The gap between 5G's promise and its reality was never a radio problem. It was a content delivery problem. Cachee closes that gap.