Latency is a term that is used to define the amount of time it takes to send a data packet from one source to another destination. High latency will slow down the transfer, which will affect the encoding, transmission and decoding, which are all elements in the process of sending the file. Delivery protocols like FTP are more susceptible to latency because it requires acknowledgment of the file trying to be transferred before the next file can be sent. You can only imagine the time consumption involved in this process.