In order to avoid the need to be on a network which allows inbound traffic, you need to connect outbound to a server which will relay requests from clients which also make outbound connections to it.
This in essence is like the model of a communication satellite. Both the user's computer or phone or whatever, and the IoT device, maintain links "up" to this server in the cloud, and it takes each message which comes up on one side and sends it down on the other, and vice versus.
There are many possible ways to implement such a server. One that is currently trendy is to make it be an MQTT Broker. In MQTT, clients (both the IoT device and user devices) make outbound connections to the broker, and the broken shares messages which are "published" on a "topic" by one client to all clients which have "subscribed" to that "topic" topic.
Because there is already a connection established, the broker can send unsolicited traffic down it without any polling-interval latency
To keep the connections established, occasional keep-alive traffic is sent
If the connection breaks there are rules for trying to re-establish it
Essentially, noticeable latency only occurs if the broker tries to relay a message down, and the connection turns out to be broken and not yet repaired, in which case the message would be delayed until re-connection is accomplished. (There options for holding messages, dropping them etc).
