Physics! Light speed, & Latency
| February 27th, 2009Here I am, yet again, 2 months later, explaining to people who claim to be intelligent, that the delay in packets that travel ~9,000 miles can’t be sped up. No matter how I try to explain that bandwidth has NOTHING to do with how fast a packet travels on the wire, they don’t seem to “get it”.
On one hand, I wanted spend the time, effort, and frustration explaining the basics of an object traveling through space at maximum velocity cannot, (as we understand it today) go faster than the speed of light. On the other hand, I really don’t have the patience for people who don’t even try to understand. Now when you add to that, the delay in propagation on copper, fiber, and all of router hops the traffic has to take to get between India and the South East United States, the problem compounds.
I finally found this web site, which is now added to my Delicious pages…
It’s the Latency, Stupid
I recommend it for ANYONE in networking.
When I first started working on this problem, I was on a conference call with a bunch of people from around the world, and someone asked, “Can you explain what the cause of the latency between India and Atlanta is?”… to which I replied, “The pacific ocean?”
This past time, I had to remind everyone that the packets travel over 9,000 miles to get to Atlanta, and that using a very inefficient protocol like RDP is going to really show off the latency. Regardless of how much bandwidth there is on both sides of the connection. (A 7mbps link in India, and 2x DS3’s in Atlanta).
Ahh, the joys of a “Global” network.
