Question
What would cause a frame relay circuit to have high latency?
Answer
GPRS is different from the older Circuit Switched Data (or CSD) connection included in GSM standards. In CSD, a data connection establishes a circuit, and reserves the full bandwidth of that circuit during the lifetime of the connection. GPRS is packet-switched which means that multiple users share the same transmission channel, only transmitting when they have data to send. This means that the total available bandwidth can be immediately dedicated to those users who are actually sending at any given moment, providing higher utilisation where users only send or receive data intermittently. Web browsing, receiving e-mails as they arrive and instant messaging are examples of uses that require intermittent data transfers, which benefit from sharing the available bandwidth.
— Source: Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org)