The search giant announced today it is joining five other companies to build a $300 million undersea cable system that will span the Pacific Ocean, making the Internet faster for users in Asia.

The high speed submarine cable, called Faster, will connect two coastal locations in Japan with major West Coast cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.

Once complete, the cable will operate at 60 terabits per second, which is about ten million times faster than the typical cable modem, Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president of technical infrastructure, said today in a Google+ post.

"At Google we want our products to be fast and reliable, and that requires a great network infrastructure, whether it's for the more than a billion Android users or developers building products on Google Cloud Platform," Hölzle said. "And sometimes the fastest path requires going through an ocean."

Construction on Faster will begin immediately, according to a news release from NEC, the IT and network technology company that was awarded the contract to lay the cable. The project is scheduled to make its debut sometime during the second quarter of 2016.

Interesting tidbit, but really belongs in OT.

Also given the whining from the previous merges, I dont see BW having any particular incentive to compress to a single server.

Even Google can't make the light go any faster. And let's face it, light is just too slow for an across-the-planet single server. Latency matters.

Light travels at 300.000 kilometres per second, thats roughly seven and a half times around the earth.

There are 3 scientists standing behind me right now because they wouldnt believe me someone posted something like that

Light travels at 300.000 kilometres per second, thats roughly seven and a half times around the earth.

There are 3 scientists standing behind me right now because they wouldnt believe me someone posted something like that

Considering anything more than 50 ms is relatively noticeable (hell even someone with 150 ms ping is a nightmare when playing things like gsf), the speed of light is a significant factor in cross continent latency for video games.

Considering anything more than 50 ms is relatively noticeable (hell even someone with 150 ms ping is a nightmare when playing things like gsf), the speed of light is a significant factor in cross continent latency for video games.

<sigh>

<sigh>

That's what I thought...

The issue isn't the speed of light in the fibre, it's all the other **** your packets have to go through to get to the fibre in the first place. Such as:

from your modem to the exchange, possibly being converted to light at a street-side cabinet (may well get contention here if your ISP is too cheap to put in enough capacity)

from the exchange to the backbone of the network (again, more delays if your ISP hasn't sprung for enough capacity, or if there's not enough capacity in general even if it's not your ISP's fault *cough* BT et al & rural exchanges), though at least this should be through fibre

across god-knows how many other networks to the SWTOR server, again, more delays depending on the capacity of the path your packets take

But in general, the speed of light probably isn't going to be an issue. Distance & capacity along the route are.

Light travels at 300.000 kilometres per second, thats roughly seven and a half times around the earth.

There are 3 scientists standing behind me right now because they wouldnt believe me someone posted something like that

Through vacuum, most likely? I'm assuming these are theoretical scientists, not experimental or any other type that actually have contact with the real world.

Light travels at 300.000 kilometres per second, thats roughly seven and a half times around the earth.

There are 3 scientists standing behind me right now because they wouldnt believe me someone posted something like that

The refractive index of a vacuum is 1, by definition. The refractive index of the cladding of an optical fiber is 1.52. The core value is typically 1.62. The larger the index of refraction, the slower light travels in that medium. From this information, a simple rule of thumb is that a signal using optical fiber for communication will travel at around 200,000 kilometers per second. To put it another way, the signal will take 5 milliseconds to travel 1000 kilometers in fiber. Thus a phone call carried by fiber between Sydney and New York, a 16,000-kilometer distance, means that there is a minimum delay of 80 milliseconds (about 1/12 of a second) between when one caller speaks to when the other hears.

Mesa most welcome educamating scientist.

Lets just say, you wrote something stupid and anyone with even remote knowledge of the subject knows it ;-)

You'd think someone so condescendingly-intelligent would be capable of explaining the concepts in a simplistic nature.

P.S. I don't care to know, the implied tone of your posts just left a bad taste in my mouth.

So then it is possible?

The odds of it happening are extremely unlikely.

Mesa most welcome educamating scientist.

80ms for someone in the Oceanic region playing on a US East Coast server sounds pretty damn impressive to me.

As I commented in another thread, light speed is not all its cracked up to be. It sounds really, really fast in human terms. In computer timing it makes a big difference.

Speed of light In Vacuum - 186,000 miles/second

So therefore - 186 miles/millisecond

Your RAM and CPU/GPU operate on the nanosecond scale. Milliseconds are quite long to computers.

West Coast US to London ~ 6,000 miles

At vacuum speed that adds 32 milliseconds. A ballpark puts light in fiber at 80% at best.

That will add 40 milliseconds to the latency PURELY from light travel. Add in extra router hops, traffic congestion and the fact that the signal does not travel as the crow flies over fiber the entire distance and it all adds up.

As I commented in another thread, light speed is not all its cracked up to be. It sounds really, really fast in human terms. In computer timing it makes a big difference.

 

Speed of light In Vacuum - 186,000 miles/second

So therefore - 186 miles/millisecond

Your RAM and CPU/GPU operate on the nanosecond scale. Milliseconds are quite long to computers.

 

West Coast US to London ~ 6,000 miles

At vacuum speed that adds 32 milliseconds. A ballpark puts light in fiber at 80% at best.

That will add 40 milliseconds to the latency PURELY from light travel. Add in extra router hops, traffic congestion and the fact that the signal does not travel as the crow flies over fiber the entire distance and it all adds up.

so your saying we need to figure out how to make an ftl drive for data packets? get on it scientists and bring me my hover board, flying car and self tieing shoes you dont want to make back to future 2's future wrong do you?

You'd think someone so condescendingly-intelligent would be capable of explaining the concepts in a simplistic nature.

 

P.S. I don't care to know, the implied tone of your posts just left a bad taste in my mouth.

Yeah you`re right, I apologize.

The idea behind the problems is that not the speed of light is the problem, but the technics transporting it. The equation you quoted before is called Youngs index of refraction, and states that light basically cant be slowed down, but its energy is indeed affected. In plain text that means that the speed of light is absolute, but the data transfer rate in fibreglass is slower by a factor of 1,87 (I think, dont know if I remember correctly here).

Ultimately the point of our discussion was that the speed of light is never the problem, its the technology. Light travels way too fast. humanity cant use its full potential with the technology we have at the moment.

So you saying that "google cant speed up the light" sounded, lets say, really strange

Again, sorry if I sounded rude, that wasn`t my intention. Well, in the heat of the moment maybe it was, but thats forumdynamics :>

Yeah you`re right, I apologize.

 

The idea behind the problems is that not the speed of light is the problem, but the technics transporting it. The equation you quoted before is called Youngs index of refraction, and states that light basically cant be slowed down, but its energy is indeed affected. In plain text that means that the speed of light is absolute, but the data transfer rate in fibreglass is slower by a factor of 1,87 (I think, dont know if I remember correctly here).

Ultimately the point of our discussion was that the speed of light is never the problem, its the technology. Light travels way too fast. humanity cant use its full potential with the technology we have at the moment.

So you saying that "google cant speed up the light" sounded, lets say, really strange

 

Again, sorry if I sounded rude, that wasn`t my intention. Well, in the heat of the moment maybe it was, but thats forumdynamics :>

Light is way too fast for HUMAN comprehension. At computer timing levels, light is not fast enough. Supercomputers using fiber connections are build with the parts as close together as possible because every extra distance the signal has to travel slows down the processing. 32 milliseconds at full light speed from Los Angeles to London is a long, long time in computer terms. Stop thinking like a human.

You guys worry too much about Latency.

I am currently in Brazil, currently playing on a French server and guess what? I can roll operations just fine. It isn't as smooth as it was in France, but my head and actions can adapt to the latency.

You all seem to be forgetting that ping time measures a round-trip. Also, if there's a single global server, there will be someone at the other side of the world, so we might as well use the full 20000 km distance rather than picking two arbitrary cities.

As someone posted, the speed of light in an optical fiber is about 200000 km/s. One-way trip takes 100 ms, so the round-trip is 200 ms. If the routers on the way are really good and there aren't too many of them, you might get away with 50 ms additional latency from them, for a total of 250 ms.

Is it possible to do ops on 250 ms latency? Definitely, I'm pretty sure I've completed one on 500 ms when my connection was having problems. Will it put you at a disadvantage in PvP compared to someone sitting in the next town from the server and having 70 ms latency? I would imagine so.

Thus, while a single global server might be technically possible, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea. Also, as someone mentioned, there would be a huge amount of complaining as a lot of people would inevitably lose their names in the merge.

You can't merge pvp servers with pve servers.

Sure you can, just make PvP layers and PvE layers.

You all seem to be forgetting that ping time measures a round-trip. Also, if there's a single global server, there will be someone at the other side of the world, so we might as well use the full 20000 km distance rather than picking two arbitrary cities.

 

Thus, while a single global server might be technically possible, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea. Also, as someone mentioned, there would be a huge amount of complaining as a lot of people would inevitably lose their names in the merge.

I would be surprised if they only had hardware in one location, since that would likely screw over the guys in Aus/NZ/SA/etc (since lets face it, they'd probably put the hardware in the US if they had to have it in one location). That said, this is BW we're talking about, so maybe they would have all of the hardware in one location (if they chose to do it, which I personally doubt they would)...

Sure you can, just make PvP layers and PvE layers.

We dont even need PvPlayers. I play on a PvPserver since 2012. In all the time I had exactly 4 openworld-encounters.