Eli5 How come it is not possible to have fast internet across the globe so players from different continents can play together with good ping (<100ms)?

Question

Eli5 How come it is not possible to have fast internet across the globe so players from different continents can play together with good ping (<100ms)?

In: 0

Answer 1

Speed of light.

Earth’s circumference is about 40,000km, so the distance between two points on Earth can be up to 20,000km. Even if you could deliver information at the speed of light between these two points, it would still takes 133ms for a message to go back and forth, and that’s ignoring and other latencies. In practice, data travels through fiber optic at about 2/3 the speed of light, so it would take even longer.