Because Sony has (naïvely) limited download speeds by limiting how many packets can be "in flight" at a given time. Say for example that they clamped it down t

Because Sony has (naïvely) limited download speeds by limiting how many packets can be "in flight" at a given time. Say for example that they clamped it down to a single packet in flight. In that case, if the server was 30ms (round trip time) away then you could only get a packet every 30ms, and if the server was 60ms away then it would cut your speed in half. In normal situations this doesn't happen: your max-packets-in-flight limit (aka your receive window) will eventually scale large enough that it doesn't matter how far you are from a server, the speed will eventually reach the bandwidth limit of the slowest part of the route.