dellsup

I happen to work for Time Warner (everyone hates cable companies i know!). I love my connection at work, fiber 50meg symetrical and I get free 10mbx512k at home =/

Jeepo_SAS

Apparantly the EU wants everyone to have an "accaptable" level of Broadbad in the next 10 years.....wonder what they mean by that? I should sue somebody!!!

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|TG-1st|Jeepo
TG-1st 2IC | ArmA GO | TG Pathfinder

The Vanguard

"I like our siggy's too. Partially because they are superbly done, but also because they were done by Xmaster whom I have a deep sexual desire for" - Python1

thegreatnardini

My University just installed a 1.0 Gbps network over the summer, and man is it fast .

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Zhohar

How is ping related to data throughput?
As much of a technology (and esp. internet) enthusiast I am, I wouldn't be interested in download speeds above 10Mb/s. What I *would* be interested in is a way to ping the east coast and Europe <20. For that, I would definitely pay money.

Download speeds ... feh. I download things off rapidshare/megaupload/etc and torrents regularly, but I've never felt impatient while downloading. Sure, it'd be "nice" to get 20MB/s download speed, but I've sure as heck felt more impatient, and more times, when a bout of lag sprouted out of nowhere as I was about to knife a fella in BF2142.

Just my opinion.

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Pfft, how can you call it suicidal if we lived through it?

Acreo Aeneas

The faster your connection is the lower your latency times will be overall, but especially when pinging (and transferring data back-and-forth) to a server across the sea(s). My own experience has been that the marginal latency that drops between one connection speed to the next gradually drops as well (think of the curve of a log).

If you have access to a very fast internet connection, try pinging a GameServer.com game server in the UK (London) and compare the average ping times to what you get at your house.


If you want really low pings on servers overseas, then there needs to be a lot of work done to somehow speed up the transmission of data across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Even with the fiber-optic cabling that links the various continents now, it isn't fast enough to reduce the latency gain over that long distance to lower than 20 ms.


Lag in gaming can be hard to pinpoint. It has a lot to do with the quality of your line, the path your data travels, hardware routers and lines along the way, server hardware, datacenter the server sits in, etc.

The connections of other players also play a big factor in your overall latency stability to the game server you play on.

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Bamboo

For the ping time to be lower, you have to have all the hops running tip top at their fastest with a fast connection. If even one hop is slow, it can kill your ping times. So Zhohar is correct that even if you had this dreamy speed of internet to your house, unless all the pipes between you and the server had the same or better, it won't matter.

But I would still rather be able to download a new version of PR mod in 30 sec. than the 30 mins it takes me now. And I know it takes some people a day or more to download it. Ouch. I remember service pack 1 and 2 for XP taking more than a day or 2 on dial up. NEVER AGAIN!

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LINKS
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-Carlos A. Urbizo-

Acreo Aeneas

Heh, it took me 3.5 hours to download PR 0.8. I wish I could download it in 30 minutes...that would be very nice.

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ScratchMonkey

Think of a long series of pipes carrying water, passing through various pumps along the way. Imagine a single drop traversing the pipes.

The "ping" is how long it takes for the drop to get from one end to the other. This is also the latency.

The "throughput" is how much water is passing a point on the pipe.

A really fat pipe with slow moving water can have high throughput but long latency.

A really long pipe (the equivalent of a satellite network connection that's 70,000 miles long) will have long latency.

Downloads benefit from throughput. Games benefit from low latency.

And packet loss (which I don't model here) is a killer of both. Drop a packet, and the sending end has to wait for the receiving end to notice and ask for another copy. The longer the latency, the longer you wait before the missing packet is noticed.

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