With the Internet speed become faster and faster, why does the online game ping/latency seemed stagnant?
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Ping in an online game is a measure of how quickly a signal can get from you to that particular game server and back. If you are far away, or the signal is traveling over copper rather than fiber optic, it takes longer.
The only way to change it would be to get closer or if the infrastructure between you and the server got upgraded.
Think of it like a highway where all the cars can only go 60 mph and you are 60 miles from your destination. Increasing the bandwidth is like making the highway wider so more cars can drive on it at once, but it still takes an hour to drive there.
Mostly because the speed you can move an electron down a given medium is fixed and dictated by the laws of physics.
Bandwidth, how much data you can shove down a pipe, improves, but the time to get from one end to the other is pretty well fixed.
Think of it like a highway.
The speed limit is 60 MPH. It’ll take an hour to drive 60 miles if there’s no traffic getting in your way.
Now take that same highway and add 30 lanes. The speed limit is still 60, it’ll still take an hour to drive 60 miles. But now the highway can handle significantly more cars before traffic starts getting in your way.
Ping/Latency depends on how fast the routers between you and them are and how much distance the data has to actually travel and how fast that data can travel — copper wires like co-ax is much slower than fiber which uses pulses of light between repeater stations, which in turn is slower than direct transmission which travels the speed of light and isn’t slowed down by having to be repeated ever 30 miles or so but is generally limited by line of sight and the ultimate line-of-sight are satellites… which are about 0.17 seconds away which is why satellite internet has such terrible ping.
There’s two different ways to measure internet speed: bandwidth and latency. Bandwidth is how much data you can move at one time and latency is how long it would take any amount of data to reach you from the sender. Improving one doesn’t necessarily improve the other and most of the gains have been in bandwidth.
Imagine you had a pipe that would bring you water from across town. If you were trying to fill a bathtub, and wanted it to go faster, you could get a bigger pipe(this is like improving bandwidth). But having a giant pipe won’t necessarily get you a single drop of water any quicker, because it still has to go from one end of the pipe to the other. To get a single drop of water quicker, you would need a shorter pipe.
There’s always been this give and take in computers, when the hardware increases something you get a brief period where that isn’t even an issue and doesn’t have to be considered, then the software side will take it for granted and race it back up.
Memory was so precious and so sparse way back when that code optimization was an absolutely crucial part of programming, shaving bytes here and there or using clever programing tricks to fool the user or sidestep some intense calculation. But then memory began to shrink and became to plentiful we didn’t know what to do with all of it. So now we have a Call of Duty game that is 1.2 tb and half of that is flashy reflective gun camos of which a small section will be visible at any given time and probably not recognized, such is the value of memory anymore.
As we get better hardware of any kind, it will be treated as such a non issue that optimization won’t even be considered, until it absolutely has to be. We’re just approaching that level with memory, it won’t be an issue for a while yet but someday soon we won’t be able to cram more in, we’ll approach the atomic scale so unless someone creates a marketable quantum transistor we’ll come up to that wall again. We haven’t approached that with bandwidth yet, it keeps getting better and better but companies assume that all of us have access to a 1200mbs connection. Optimization is not prioritized and taken for granted.
Ping isn’t dependent on speed, but rather work. Your signal has to make it through your network to the cable company then into the game servers, and your bit will hit a lot of red lights along the way.
Internet speed is based on how much you can send out or receive at once, not the speed it can be sent. Ping/latency is dependent on the speed it can be sent, which without changing the lines or moving closer to the recipient you won’t be able to change.
TLDR: internet speed is dependent on the width of the hose, ping is dependent on the length
“Internet speed” can easily be improved by laying more cables and other investments in infrastructure.
Latency is mostly limited by the speed of electricity and electromagnetic radiation (ie. light and radio waves) over a given distance. Realistically you can only improve latency by reducing the distance (which is what CDNs and multiplayer matchmaking algorithms do, and why automatic stock traders operate from data centers close to Wall Street), or by focusing on the small portion of latency that is introduced in network equipment like switches and exchanges (mostly by increasing processing power of those devices, which has high cost for minimal gain).
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