International ping

[Mmmmyum]

I said to a friend on TF2 today that he won't ping too badly trying to connect to a German server with his slow internet (mine's a 1Mb/s, South African standard basically :/ ) that his slow connection doesn't affect ping that much, but c does. My thinking is that as long as his internet's got enough bandwidth to carry the TF2 packet, c will mostly define the ping

EDIT: Ignore the bad grammar, sick right now...

And due to the law of conservation of energy, have we changed the solar system with all our gravitational slingshots for the far future?

Edited December 12, 2013 by Mmmmyum

[vetrox]

ping is a measure of distance really.

IE. My ping (a better term would be latency) is higher when connecting to a U.S server because they are a bajillion miles away (also i'm fairly sure wireless transmission increases ping slightly...or packet loss...or something but the ping for dummies version above should suffice)

A slow bandwidth will just mean he cant process as much data per second. Games dont really use that much bandwidth.

When i play dota on south african servers i get a 200+ ms ping.

[andrewas]

Ping is a measure of network hops as well as distance. Signals travel through fibre at something very close to c, but getting from one side of a router to the other takes significant time. Anyway, latency and bandwidth are completely independent and a slow connection is not necessarily a problem.

As for changing the solar system, I remember reading somewhere that voyager 1's influence on jupiters position is roughly the width of a proton. So no. Our effect on the planets is immeasurably tiny, and that's not likely to change in the future unless we set out to move planets. Which we might, Mars could do with a slightly lower and much less eccentric orbit.

[Nuke]

ping is a measure of time it takes for a sender of a packet to get an acknowledgement from the recipient. distance is just one factor, there are propagation delays in any device you go through. this is just an aspect of semiconductor design. you usually have to wait for a signal to stabilize to read an output of a logic gate. when the signal transitions from low to high or vise versa you get something called ringing, where the signal is still fluctuating and can be in error if you sample it too quickly. so number of routers your packet needs to go through plays a huge role.

then of course the mediums between the routers, fiber, copper, microwave, whatever have their own quirks. we assume signals travel at the speed of light, but this is not actually true. speed of light through fiber or the speed of microwaves through the atmosphere is less than the speed of light in vacuum. different mediums have a different speed of light which is always less than c. its a convoluted mess so saying ping is anything other than a measure of time is a gross oversimplification.

Edited December 12, 2013 by Nuke