thereverend.org may be getting fiber optic soon. i talked to the verizon bucket truck guy today - he's installing the cable on our street right NOW. has anyone gotten fiber before? i heard its either a really great experience or a really bad one.

There are a few servers running with it, they're very fast. Verizon, however, has a generally bad rep for stuff... so, good luck =).

i just called verizon and it will start rolling out on my street this spring. i hope the ping times are better than my timewarner cable.

Ping times will be a non issue....

You get your ping times from the # of hops you have to have to connect between 2 points. For example using the old landline telephone system you might call up your neighbor next door but your connection could be routed through Nowhere Nigeria, then Asswipe Arizona, and then .... well you get the point. Recently telephone companies have implemented a "star" network where the telephone lines sorta circle an area so that if a cable gets cut in the circle a majority of people don't lose their telephone. The signal can reroute around the cut line. The internet is set up similarly you can take out a router/switch and the signal can get around the "cut" line but may have to travel a significantly longer distance to make the trip.

This is all physics you may only be across the street from a game server but your internet connection might route you 5-10,000 miles it really gets worse if you use a satellite as there is probably 23,000 miles up and 23,000 miles down, so the best ping time even if you were pinging yourself through the satellites would be around 231 ms.

Yes, but here's the catch 22... most fios connections actually do improve your ping. Why? Because they route thru higher priority routes than your average cable traffic... ala QoS.

You'll also notice, if you do a lot of tracerts, that just because someone is further away you might get less latency per hop and average a smaller ping. So it's not all about hop distance.

Also consider the cable is usually a shared bandwidth, whereas fiber optic is not. During peak loads your packets won't get buffered as long, will be sent over less saturated routes and thus your ping (and packet loss) will improve.

There are a few players here with fiber optic connections and generally speaking their pings are much better than mine. In one game in particular I was both closer to the server geographically and hop wise, but yet they consistently averaged 10ms better than me.

Star topology is the most efficient routing in terms of latency, but is the least efficient in terms of layout and implementation cost. IIRC a perfect star requires a geometrically expanding number of lines per new connection. It would be unsuitable for home deployment, but ideal for key node redundancy.

The speed of light is 186282 miles per second. Even if you're talking 23k miles in each direction that's 46000/186282 or 247ms perfect ping. I'd love to find equipment capable of handling that, however, since it's way beyond anything we currently have... I'd be very rich, very quickly.

The easiest way to extrapolate ping is to tracert out to a set of servers, then count the number of hops to major networks like Alternet, Sprintlink, level3, etc. Since most will home to one of those networks you might find that by buying a better line and routing elsewhere you'll connect closer to the hub, improving your ping. That would, of course, be the goal.

This is really the issue. If the teleswitch is backed up your packet has to wait. Max utilazation improves profit.

Thank you!

Not meant being sarcastic or anything but the BS I spewed earlier might just be BS as I am just a lowly peon, and am pulling ballpark figures out my rectum (Butt for the anatomically   impared.) But can we agree to disagree that the physics involved are correct? If it takes my signal X amount of distance and it takes your signal (assuming all other things as irrevelant that ping time s/b distance/C where C is speed of light/electrons which last time I checked is the same. But now lets throw in a monkey wrench her there is something called multiplexing that might allow you to divide the amount you send into multiple packets that may or may not arrive in order IIRC tcp protocol has no distinction as to what order the packet arrive only that if they arrive there is a protocol that says that hey if I receive that packet that I can safely say that I recieved that packet. K now I received X packet and acknowleded that packet now we have now doubled(IMHO) ping time.... takes time to receive packet and say that I received packet.

I am prefacing my opinion on what I have experience in. I have a wireless connection and I think I can safely say that in my experience this is the worst case scenario I lose communication to the transmitter .... the transmitter doing what it is supposed to do is transmit again till I get an acknowledgment that the packet has been successfully transmitted so this also doubles your response time. I have no idea the amount of data that is transfered during a simple ping request but I would guess it is significantly less than a say a telnet packet. If even 1 bit gets flipped during a transmission I am guessing that the protocol calls for a retransmission just to make sure that all data is correct. To further my argument there might be 128 bits in a ping packet but significantly more in a tcp packet where each bit has a minute chance of being flipped the odds of a bit being flipped all things being equal is significantly higher therefore having a higher chance of being retransmitted. I have packet sniffed my wireless connection and have seen that there are quite a few of these "whoops I sent ya this" but I received this so retransmit kind of things.

If I am talking out my rectum please let me know I still feel that people thing just because they ping a server in X amount of time they're connection is better and therefore they have a leg up on another opponent that has a lower ping. I say BS. IMHO it is also up to the server .... the server might only have say 4 connections and each connection has 25% of the time how much time is the server waiting on data? Say a perfect world and the server is allocating exactly 25% of resources to each connection If I start sending corrupted packets where there the server has to send back What did you say? as opposed to some one that successfully transmits data w/o errors... who is going to be "better"/quicker? (And for example I want to include dialup vs broadband. Dialup user has perfect transmission both ways but broadband has a .01 chance of an error on each transmitted/received packet. ...
Now for the Math .... people generally don't thing of things mathematically but lets look at the math.
I have a 100% pure connection at X ping. You have a 99% connection now you have a 1% chance of repeating a lost packet but that costs you 2 times the 1% and if you do it again it is now 2^N times as likely your going to lose a packet.
Sorry my math leaves a lot to be desired but each time you lose a packet it takes you 2 times times to reacknowledge the asame packet.

Some one more wiser than I will correct me but ping is overrated.

In a vacuum.

Which is why it's the perfect ping... can't get any faster.

Maniac, there are NUMEROUS delays on top of the speed of light that will slow your ping down. But 186282 miles per second is the absolute fastest that packet is ever going to travel. Atleast with all we know of physics. I know of no way to encapsulate the data in little warp nacels, however maybe if you had a fig lock on the receiving end you could twarp it there...

23000 * 2 = 46000
46000/186282 = .2469

I assure you those numbers are correct.

That is the fastest you're ever going to get. It's quite possible you'll get slower... infact if you ever do manage to reach anywhere close to this rate for any length of time, let me know. I'm sure I can manage to find funding for the next phase...

Double edit: Dialup users don't have perfect xmit rates, packets still get lost on dialup. Ever have someone pick up the phone and the retrain doesn't catch correctly?

Ping is important in some elements of the game, and some elements of the net.

I suggest setting up Backdoors at both ends. That would encapsulate the data in little warp nacels.

Dialup sucks... and it does matter alot in the game....

i didn't read after the first post...
sooo


GO REV!

As far as ping and fiber optic vs. T1...

When I was playing at the library amongst 400 computers on T1 my ping was always 400 or higher.

When the library went fiber optic, my ping ranged between 120 and 250 virtually all the time.

Naw, Not Much Difference