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

There are two issues:

1) The speed of electricity (or, in the case of optical fibre, the speed of light).

2) The ‘hops’ between various switches and data centers that route your packets to and from the correct place.

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If you were trying to play on a server the other side of the world, where the entire length of the connection around the world was fibre and there were absolutely no hops in between, it would still take around 200ms for a simple ping to get back to you. This is based on the world’s circumference being around 40,000km and the speed of light in fibre being around 200,000km/s.

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But this is just the theoretical minimum. In practice you need to add in multiple hops in data centers and almost certainly some sections being on much slower copper wiring.