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What is the fundamental limit on game streaming?
(beehaw.org)
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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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Asklemmy
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For most of us, there is no difference though; you get what you get.
I live in a nice neighborhood but I won’t ever get fiber… we have underground utilities and this area is served by coaxial cable. There’s no way in hell they are digging up miles of streets to lay fiber; you get what you get.
My ISP latency is like 16-20ms but when sim racing it just depends on where the race server is (and where my competitors are). As someone on the US west coast, if I’m matched with folks in EU and some others in AUS/NZ, the server will likely be in EU and my ping will be > 200. My Aussie competitors will be dealing with 300-400.
It’s not impossible to share a track at those latencies, but for close racing or a competitive shooter… errrr that just doesn’t work.
The fact that I’m always at around 200ms for EU servers might be improved if we could run a single strand of fiber from my house to the EU sever (37ms!) but there would still be switching delays, etc. so yeah the speed of light is the limit, but to your point, there’s a lot of other stuff that adds overhead.
Theoretically it doesn’t really matter whether your connection is fiber or copper. Electricity moves through copper roughly at the same speed as light moves through fiber. The advantages that fiber has over copper is that it can be run longer distances without needing boosting, and that you can run an absolute fuckton more end-to-end connections in the same diameter of cable. More connections means less contention - at least at one end of the pipe. The problem then moves to the ISP’s routers :)
I’d say that the chances are actually quite good that you’ll get fiber internet within the next 10 years. Whether or not it improves your internet connection is another question entirely!
Right on man, thanks for the additional context/info. Much appreciated!
It needs less boosting, fiber still needs repeaters over sufficiently long spans.
Really the biggest advantage to fiber from a consumer perspective is that it's not subject to signal deformation and interference. You don't have nearly as many issues with fiber Internet as a result.
Sorry, what I wrote here was unclear, I wrote it needs less boosting in another comment, but re-reading this one, it does sound like I’m claiming it needs no boosting over any distance - that’s not what I meant though! I just meant that you can run an equivalent link without any boosting further than you could with copper.
Interference isn’t actually that big of a deal for Ethernet over copper, unless the installer does something silly like run UTP alongside high power electrical lines, or next to a diesel generator, or something. Between shielding, the use of balanced signals, and the design of twisted pair, most interference is eliminated.
This should be true, but in practice ... there are a lot more environmental factors that can and do impact a copper cables (which can result in some really wacky situations to diagnose, "this only happens on hot days when XYZ part of the line to your house expands"), and more installation errors (e.g., not grounding the wire). That doesn't matter much for TCP applications/protocols but for UDP applications/protocols that can all add up to be something that's observable in the real world.
You get a lot closer to "all" interference being removed with fiber ... and for most gamers at least, that's probably the most noticeable improvement on fiber vs "cable" service (other than perhaps a download/upload speed bump). Pings are in my experience roughly the same, though the fiber networks tend to fair a bit better (probably just from newer hardware backing the network).
It's becoming more of an issue too (in Ohio at least) because more and more ISPs are locking folks out of their modem's diagnostics, so they can't actually see that the modem is detecting signal quality issues coming into the house... I almost always recommend folks just go with fiber all the way into their house if they have the option, unless they just use the web and watch videos (in which case who cares, TCP will make it so you don't care unless it's really bad, and the really bad cases are typically fixed the first time the tech is out).
It's one of those things where there's not much of a benefit for consumers on paper (theoretically -- as you say -- you could have copper service that's just as good and fast as fiber) ... but in practice, fiber just saves a lot of headaches for all parties because of its resistance to interference and simpler installation.