Question About Ping

[BestHyun]

If you plan to play from a country really far from the US such as Korea/China/etc... will it make ping drastically high?

Does anyone play from a really far country from the US and still have good ping aroud 50-250?

[Darkfader]

Ping is as known as latency in ms between your device and server.
Country's far from us makes your ping higher but it have lot of differences, as example I play from Finland(northern Europe) and my ping is usually around 370-400.

[Skeletonlord]

In In the uk which is quite a way from the us and my ping is fine

[BodMaster]

Also depends on your connection speed along with this.. my ping upto recently using 3G/H was anywhere from 300-600 (orange and red, Ping of Death spikes from 2k-50k), I now have a new WiFi connection and its changed drastically to 100-300 (though always green) so a few factors to take into account when determining your ping speed :)

[javier995]

i think its more of your internet connection as the guy above me said. the better connection you have the better your ping is. wifi might be one of the best ways to have low ping

[Ephemeris]

Latency is generally also a function of the number of hops (i.e., router-to-router connections) incurred between you and the end point. Physical distance certainly plays a factor (and, in a perfect world, it would be the only factor), but how you're routed to the end point (e.g., STS' servers) influences the ping that you see. For me -- living just a couple hundred miles North of Texas -- you would expect my latency/ping to be good. Hypothetically, though, I could be routed to STS' Texas-based servers via Siberia (in which case my ping would likely not be too impressive). You can perform a traceroute command to see: 1) the number of hops required to get you to STS' servers, and 2) the latency associated with each one of those hops. This suggestion is more applicable to a computer-based scenario, but it is possible to do this on your phone, too, with a little work. :)

[Orcish]

Latency is generally also a function of the number of hops (i.e., router-to-router connections) incurred between you and the end point. Physical distance certainly plays a factor (and, in a perfect world, it would be the only factor), but how you're routed to the end point (e.g., STS' servers) influences the ping that you see. For me -- living just a couple hundred miles North of Texas -- you would expect my latency/ping to be good. Hypothetically, though, I could be routed to STS' Texas-based servers via Siberia (in which case my ping would likely not be too impressive). You can perform a traceroute command to see: 1) the number of hops required to get you to STS' servers, and 2) the latency associated with each one of those hops. This suggestion is more applicable to a computer-based scenario, but it is possible to do this on your phone, too, with a little work. :)

I've been doing this for a while and I've noticed Dallas hubs having the highest latency.

[Otukura]

I can run a pingtest to Russia and get around 180ms ping, versus 5-6 ping here when wired. Overall, I think it depends on your ISP, but distance does have some effect.

[Ephemeris]

Your ISP/connection type certainly plays a part, but I would still contend that physical distance traversed from source to destination is -- today -- the single most important factor. Since most of us are playing SL/PL via mobile phones, I think it's safe to assume that the majority of us are hitting the "internet" via our home networks (i.e., Wi-Fi on cable/DSL) or through our mobile phone providers' networks. Regardless, almost all back-end providers are utilizing fiber optic backbones these days (it's more efficient and reliable than the legacy Copper-based connections). I was going to type up the math on how this ultimately plays out, but -- glancing over at Wikipedia -- there's a great, high-level summary that I'll borrow to save time:

Latency is largely a function of the speed of light, which is 299,792,458 meters/second in vacuum. This would equate to a latency of 3.33 microseconds for every kilometer of path length. Because the index of refraction of most fiber optic cables is about 1.5, light travels about 1.5 times as fast in a vacuum as it does in the cable. This works out to about 4.9 microseconds of latency for every kilometer. In shorter metro networks, the latency performance rises a bit more due to building risers and cross-connects and can bring the latency as high as 5 microseconds per kilometer. It follows that to calculate latency of a connection, one has to know the distance traveled by the fiber, which is rarely a straight line, since it has to traverse geographic contours and obstacles, such as roads and railway tracks, as well as other rights-of-way. Due to imperfections in the fiber, light degrades as it is transmitted through it. For distances of greater than 100 kilometers, either amplifiers or regenerators need to be deployed. Accepted wisdom has it that amplifiers add less latency than regenerators, though in both cases it can be highly variable, and so needs to be taken into account. In particular, legacy spans are more likely to make use of higher latency regenerators.

Hopefully that explanation helps. :)