The post from 1996 is relevant again because the same story is repeating itself over mobile connections. Note how the mobile networks never advertise latencies

The post from 1996 is relevant again because the same story is repeating itself over mobile connections. Note how the mobile networks never advertise latencies (round-trip-time) of the network, always the bandwidth. I can't find the reference now but I've seen a rule of thumb that basically says that in all data transfer technologies (whether they be moving data between disk and memory, DRAM and CPU or between two nodes on the internet), the advancements in bandwidth go approximately as square of the advances in latency. E.g., a newer radio protocol for mobile networks might have quadruple the bandwidth of the previous technology but will most likely only improve the round-trip time by a factor of 2. (Subject to of course the fundamental speed-of-light limitation on propagation of signal... you're never going to get a 2x improvement in coast-to-coast ping latency over fiber optics cable over what's already achievable (something like .6c )