With the Internet speed become faster and faster, why does the online game ping/latency seemed stagnant?

Question

With the Internet speed become faster and faster, why does the online game ping/latency seemed stagnant?

In: 3

Answer 1

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.