cyril7: As posted earlier 5uSec/km

Cyril

RunningMan:

freitasm: It takes the light around 35ms to travel between Auckland and Los Angeles. Round trip is 70ms.

Add to this from your home to the ISP, then from Los Angeles to whatever place the server you want to reach is located, then take in consideration the server load and pretty much you won't get less than 100ms to USA from New Zealand.

And that's of course assuming that whatever medium transports the signal takes the shortest straight line route, and there's no other devices like repeaters or similar that artificially increase the length...

Why microwaves? Is the speed of light too slow, as traders have complained? The Journal reports that microwaves take 4.25 milliseconds to travel between New York and Chicago, beating the 6.55 milliseconds for infrared light traveling through a fibre-optic cable, attributing the difference to more bends in the cable. 

That's not quite right. Both light and microwaves are electromagnetic waves, so they should travel at the cosmic speed limit of about 300,000 kilometres per second. At that speed, they should take only about 4 milliseconds to make the 1200-kilometre journey between Chicago and New York. 

But that universal speed limit occurs when electromagnetic waves move through a vacuum - they travel more slowly through materials. Light signals travel through the glass core of an optical fibre at about 200,000 kilometres per second. By contrast microwaves go through air, which barely slows them down at all. In the world of high stakes flash trading, even that small difference adds up to big money.

Klipspringer:

RunningMan:

freitasm: It takes the light around 35ms to travel between Auckland and Los Angeles. Round trip is 70ms.

Add to this from your home to the ISP, then from Los Angeles to whatever place the server you want to reach is located, then take in consideration the server load and pretty much you won't get less than 100ms to USA from New Zealand.

And that's of course assuming that whatever medium transports the signal takes the shortest straight line route, and there's no other devices like repeaters or similar that artificially increase the length...

Some interesting info

Microwaves faster than fibre optics

Why microwaves? Is the speed of light too slow, as traders have complained? The Journal reports that microwaves take 4.25 milliseconds to travel between New York and Chicago, beating the 6.55 milliseconds for infrared light traveling through a fibre-optic cable, attributing the difference to more bends in the cable. 

That's not quite right. Both light and microwaves are electromagnetic waves, so they should travel at the cosmic speed limit of about 300,000 kilometres per second. At that speed, they should take only about 4 milliseconds to make the 1200-kilometre journey between Chicago and New York. 

But that universal speed limit occurs when electromagnetic waves move through a vacuum - they travel more slowly through materials. Light signals travel through the glass core of an optical fibre at about 200,000 kilometres per second. By contrast microwaves go through air, which barely slows them down at all. In the world of high stakes flash trading, even that small difference adds up to big money.

Who knows, maybe one day fibre-optics will be too slow.


 

DarthKermit:
I wonder if the microwave link is faster because the total distance between Chicago and New York is somewhat shorter via MW link than it is by fibre? The article doesn't say which route is the shortest.

Light signals travel through the glass core of an optical fibre at about 200,000 kilometres per second. By contrast microwaves go through air, which barely slows them down at all. In the world of high stakes flash trading, even that small difference adds up to big money.

Light signals travel through the glass core of an optical fibre at about 200,000 kilometres per second. By contrast microwaves go through air, which barely slows them down at all. In the world of high stakes flash trading, even that small difference adds up to big money.

DarthKermit:

Light signals travel through the glass core of an optical fibre at about 200,000 kilometres per second. By contrast microwaves go through air, which barely slows them down at all. In the world of high stakes flash trading, even that small difference adds up to big money.

That's assuming that the figures quoted in that article are correct. I don't know if they are or not.

In High Frequency Trading (HFT) applications where computers can make millions of decisions in fractions of a second, receiving data even a single millisecond sooner can equate to a distinct advantage and generate significant profits.According to Information Week Magazine¹: “A one (1) millisecond advantage in trading applications can be worth $100 million a year to a major brokerage firm”. Currently electronic trading makes between 60% and 70% of daily volume of NYSE¹. Tabb Group, a research firm, estimated that High-frequency traders generated about $21 billion in 2008.

Microwave signals travel through the air about 50% faster than light through optical fiber. Latency in a data communications circuit, or the time difference between sending a request for data and receiving the reply, will consequently be longer over a fiber circuit than a microwave circuit of the exact same length.

• Latency is largely a function of the speed of light, which is 299,792,458 meters/second in vacuum. Microwave signals travel through the air at approximately the same speed as light through a vacuum and will have a latency of approximately 5.4 microseconds for every mile of path length. Light travel in optical fiber has latency of 8.01 microseconds for every mile of cable, due to the refraction in the fiber. When data has to travel over 1400 miles from Chicago to New York and back again the latency difference due to the communications medium alone is more than 3.5 milliseconds.

quakeguy: The obvious answer is to put game servers in Hawaii!