4 ms·

"Yeah, speed of light is actually a lot faster than people think" This would only be relevant if you had a direct fibre link in a straight line from your house

"Yeah, speed of light is actually a lot faster than people think" This would only be relevant if you had a direct fibre link in a straight line from your house to the service. It's packet switching\routing etc. that introduce latency. And even if you DID have direct fibre, the worst case scenario for distance - server on the other side of the world, but with no other latency accounted for - is about 200ms, even half of which would be noticeable in many games. I'm not saying it's impossible to do game streaming, but you can't just divide the distance by the speed of light and say it's low. That's not really the issue.

mr_toad 7y ago
> server on the other side of the world, but with no other latency accounted for - is about 200ms In practice, it’s a lot worse than 200ms. 500-700ms are typical for servers on the other side of the planet.
- vel0city 7y ago
  That definitely varies greatly from provider to provider. I usually see <300ms for world-wide pings from Texas from a FTTH residential connection. Average Pings from Digital Ocean regions: BLR1: 251ms FRA1: 129ms SGP1: 206ms Other sites: yahoo.co.jp: 179ms rakuten.co.jp: 138ms belarus.by: 167ms As most things go, YMMV.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Hikikomori 7y ago
Most of those hops would be on ISP equipment with 10G or 100G interfaces, modern routers forward packets in tens to hundreds of microseconds and switches can do it in a few microseconds, so as long as there is a bit of distance it will account for most of the delay, and SOL is 2/3 of its speed I'm vacuum. Switches can even sends out packets on a port before it has been fully received on the incoming port
- yc12340 7y ago
  > modern routers forward packets in tens to hundreds of microseconds Only when network is underutilized, and there is no throttling/bufferbloat.
  - Hikikomori 7y ago
    True, though routers with 100G interfaces do not have a lot of buffer space. But most ISP's make sure that isn't happening as it its pretty bad for their customers experience. I know some ISP's do not put enough effort into that at all but every single one I worked for did (Europe). In this case Google can put effort into direct peering relationships to make sure that their customers have a good experience.
ehsankia 7y ago
Right, which is exactly big Cloud companies such as Azure and GCP have a huge advantage over most other smaller companies, as they have their own dedicated backbone, allowing them to minimize the number of hops.

mr_toad 7y ago

> server on the other side of the world, but with no other latency accounted for - is about 200ms In practice, it’s a lot worse than 200ms. 500-700ms are typical for servers on the other side of the planet.

vel0city 7y ago
That definitely varies greatly from provider to provider. I usually see <300ms for world-wide pings from Texas from a FTTH residential connection. Average Pings from Digital Ocean regions: BLR1: 251ms FRA1: 129ms SGP1: 206ms Other sites: yahoo.co.jp: 179ms rakuten.co.jp: 138ms belarus.by: 167ms As most things go, YMMV.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Hikikomori 7y ago

Most of those hops would be on ISP equipment with 10G or 100G interfaces, modern routers forward packets in tens to hundreds of microseconds and switches can do it in a few microseconds, so as long as there is a bit of distance it will account for most of the delay, and SOL is 2/3 of its speed I'm vacuum. Switches can even sends out packets on a port before it has been fully received on the incoming port

yc12340 7y ago
> modern routers forward packets in tens to hundreds of microseconds Only when network is underutilized, and there is no throttling/bufferbloat.
- Hikikomori 7y ago
  True, though routers with 100G interfaces do not have a lot of buffer space. But most ISP's make sure that isn't happening as it its pretty bad for their customers experience. I know some ISP's do not put enough effort into that at all but every single one I worked for did (Europe). In this case Google can put effort into direct peering relationships to make sure that their customers have a good experience.

ehsankia 7y ago

Right, which is exactly big Cloud companies such as Azure and GCP have a huge advantage over most other smaller companies, as they have their own dedicated backbone, allowing them to minimize the number of hops.