:tup:Found this to be interesting and maybe even beneficial to the community. Oh the possibilities of such a fast connection, maybe with the proper networking / petitioning some of us can get hooked up nice:woot:
I would imagine that each area would need a large community backing so lets throw out some ideas on how this could be accomplished and better yet expand it beyond the SRK community so that we may reap the benefits. LETS GET HYPE!!:rock:
Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. Any lag that might be introduced into a connection between those two cities has to do with what hubs you’re connecting through.
From what I read, the Google networks will be able to service about 500,000 people. Maybe if there’s an overabundance of demand, it’ll motivate the cable companies and telecoms to upgrade their systems? But that’s probably wishful thinking.
I dont really think its really wishful thinking with google looking to do this with money out of their pocket. I fell that they just want to get the ball rolling there is already some sort of national council looking into estating broadband nationally.
Light travels at 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum. I’m unsure if it’s known how the conditions on earth affect it, but even at that speed, sending a ping from NY to LA would take about 29ms roundtrip
edit:
Point I’m making is it’s still at least 29ms of lag. Which is still pretty damn good for such a distance compared to what people get now, but given that light speed on earth is probably slower, plus any lag introduced by the connecting hub, it’s not exactly “lagless”.
One frame at 60fps is 16.6ms. In a perfect world, there would be just under one frame of lag between LA and NY, using that 2700 mile distance. Of course, the world (and our Internet) isn’t perfect by any means, but can I ask where you got that 29 millisecond figure? It just seems arbitrary.
You’re talking about the one-way travel time. He’s talking about the ping time, which is the time it takes for a packet to travel to its destination and back.
As far as fat connections and low ping times, you can have a 1*(10^12)Mbps connection if you want; it’s not going to decrease your ping times without a huge overhaul of national network infrastructure.
Since the light is traveling through a quartz fiber, the actual speed will be divided by the index of refraction of quartz. So take 3 x 10^8 m/s and divide it by 1.46, and then take the distance you are using and divide it by the adjusted speed of light to get the time it would take the light to travel the given distance.
I’m not sure about modern processing technologies for typical fibers, but some fibers (such as that used as gain media in amplifiers) are doped with rare earth metals that might change the index of refraction slightly from 1.46. Since that’s the case, it probably doesn’t make sense to be using more than 3 significant digits in the calculation.
To put it bluntly, network traffic is limited by the speed of light and it is physically impossible to have lagless play between two people on opposite sides of the country or in other countries.
Whoops, I forgot about this thread. Basically, I was responding to Foley, since he mentioned already that the speed of light is different in vacuum than it is in a fiber, which slows the light down somewhat. The comment about significant digits was directed at Minifoo.
However, as Minifoo also pointed out, the real problem is at the hubs that redirect the signals.
Not sure if anyone cares, but there is this widespread misconception out there that the reason why fiber optic networks are so awesome is because they transmit information at the speed of light; actually, that’s all PR nonsense. The real primary benefit of fiber optics is high bandwidth, which gives you more channels down which you can send information, which means less time spent multiplexing between signals at the hubs.
Shit since Japan is leaps and bounds faster with internet, anything will help the states right now. I am going to be very disappointed to come back to the states and have that shitty ass internet I once had. I really enjoy downloading movies in 2-4 minutes, and uploading them instantly.