Quote Originally Posted by Adrestia View Post
1) When thinking of ping, you have a few factors, and the factor impacted by distance and line speed is called propagation delay. A toll freeway analogy used in one of my networking classes explains it very well.
First, I will admit that at the time I did write that post I did not know that due to the bouncing around and need of strengthening aspect, light does not achieve its full speed (I did read that it achieves half of its speed?!, but it may be less or more) in fiber, so yes, that would slow down everything by a fair deal.

However, I am afraid that your analogy still is used incorrectly in this case. There are several steps along the way, yes, but if a player that lives right next to the servers can get 20PING and a player that lives on the other side of the world can get to an identical server very close to him 20PING, then clearly their and the servers hardware allow very low PING. At that point what is left?! Signal strengthening and signal speed. I'm afraid to say that electronic impulses from an old network need to be strengthened significantly more often than light in fiber on top of being much slower in-between them. So traditional internet have many more "toll booths" than fiber. As if that wasn't enough, light is unaffected by most of environmental effects on its travel. Electric impulses are very much so. A lightning strikes on the way of the impulse?! Light doesn't care. Copper?! You just lost packets and that skill you used?! Yeah, it doesn't trigger.

But that's not all. Fiber optics receive more dedicated line. So imagine that. When you ride the fiber optic road you'll know you drive on a road that does not have many cars even during peak hours. On copper cables...you may end up in a traffic jam along the way.

So yes. I have overestimated fiber to some degree. However the PING and stability with an all-fiber optic internet around the world would be far better than with copper. Do note that even with currently there being plenty of fiber around, there's also plenty of copper around and every time the signal moves from one to the other there is additional time wasted on "translation". With that happening only once at the very entrance to house and once at the entrance into the data center (if even then), you'd save additional time.