The internet is a network of interconnected routers which forward internet traffic (packets) between them using a routing protocol that, generally, tries to take the shortest/fastest route.
Most routers are nowadays connected via optical fiber - especially when the distance between the routers if more than a few 10's or meters or so, or when the speeds between the routers are high (1, 10 or even 40 Gb/s) - this nowadays includes almost every router that is part of the internet. The notable exception is probably your home router/modem etc.
Either way, the propagation speed of the signals through the fiber or electrical calbe is close to the speed of light. As such, in theory you can get a packet from Melbourne, Australia to Angra de Heroismo, Azores (these are almost antipodes) in about 70ms. Now lets have a look at a real-world example. There a utility call 'traceroute' that traced your packets from router to router and conveniently output the approximate delay between each 'hop'. (Note the time im ms is 'round-trip' - so one-way is half this in theory):
The internet is a network of interconnected routers which forward internet traffic (packets) between them using a routing protocol that, generally, tries to take the shortest/fastest route.
Most routers are nowadays connected via optical fiber - especially when the distance between the routers if more than a few 10's or meters or so, or when the speeds between the routers are high (1, 10 or even 40 Gb/s) - this nowadays includes almost every router that is part of the internet. The notable exception is probably your home router/modem etc.
Either way, the propagation speed of the signals through the fiber or electrical calbe is close to the speed of light. As such, in theory you can get a packet from Melbourne, Australia to Angra de Heroismo, Azores (these are almost antipodes) in about 70ms. Now lets have a look at a real-world example. There a utility call 'traceroute' that traced your packets from router to router and conveniently output the approximate delay between each 'hop'.
The internet is a network of interconnected routers which forward internet traffic (packets) between them using a routing protocol that, generally, tries to take the shortest/fastest route.
Most routers are nowadays connected via optical fiber - especially when the distance between the routers if more than a few 10's or meters or so, or when the speeds between the routers are high (1, 10 or even 40 Gb/s) - this nowadays includes almost every router that is part of the internet. The notable exception is probably your home router/modem etc.
Either way, the propagation speed of the signals through the fiber or electrical calbe is close to the speed of light. As such, in theory you can get a packet from Melbourne, Australia to Angra de Heroismo, Azores (these are almost antipodes) in about 70ms. Now lets have a look at a real-world example. There a utility call 'traceroute' that traced your packets from router to router and conveniently output the approximate delay between each 'hop'. (Note the time im ms is 'round-trip' - so one-way is half this in theory):
The internet is a network of interconnected routers which forward internet traffic (packets) between them using a routing protocol that, generally, tries to take the shortest/fastest route.
Most routers are nowadays connected via optical fiber - especially when the distance between the routers if more than a few 10's or meters or so, or when the speeds between the routers are high (1, 10 or even 40 Gb/s) - this nowadays includes almost every router that is part of the internet. The notable exception is probably your home router/modem etc.
Either way, the propagation speed of the signals through the fiber or electrical calbe is close to the speed of light. As such, in theory you can get a packet from Melbourne, Australia to Angra de Heroismo, Azores (these are almost antipodes) in about 70ms. Now lets have a look at a real-world example. There a utility call 'traceroute' that traced your packets from router to router and conveniently output the approximate delay between each 'hop'.
7 127 ms 143 ms 139 ms i-0-1-0-0.sydp01.bi.telstraglobal.net [202.84.220.218] 8 111 ms 113 ms 64 ms i-0-5-0-2.sydp-core02.bi.telstraglobal.net [202.84.220.217] 9 167 ms 201 ms 210 ms i-0-3-0-6.paix-core01.bx.telstraglobal.net [202.84.140.194] 10 156 ms 158 ms 188 ms i-0-0-0-5.paix02.bi.telstraglobal.net [202.84.251.18] 11 204 ms 206 ms 175 ms 80.157.128.205 12 537 ms 512 ms 593 ms mad-sa3-i.MAD.ES.NET.DTAG.DE [217.5.95.173] 13 554 ms 552 ms 579 ms 80.157.129.10 14 544 ms 569 ms 545 ms 10.255.26.254 15 568 ms 568 ms 538 ms catvaweb.cabotva.net [81.20.240.40] (I've left out the hops that go over my company's intranet).
You'll notice the delays are much longer than what you'd expect just from the 'speed of light'. This is the delay introduced by the routers forwarding your packets. Sometimes they're fast, sometimes they are slow, especially when they are under load.
As you can see, the majority of the delays are due to router forwarding, not propagation delays. If you play around a bit with the traceroute tool (there are numerous web based ones you can find online), you will find that the route isn't always the same and even where it is, the delays are all over the place.
Online gaming companies host their servers in places where they have a good connection to the internet and can have deals with service providers to give their packets priority over others. Also, some internet service providers might do the same and give priority to gamers (at a price!). This is possible because as you can see, the main delays are in the routers, not in the fiber. For streaming video's this doesn't matter, for games it is critical. As such, service providers can prioritize internet packets based on their content - give video more bandwidth but a but more delay, while gaming (which doesn't need much bandwidth) can be given priority in the router's queue for minimum delays.