[coastie65]

Hi piyush, Sorry. What I was saying was that there were a lot of people that tested to a server that was only 35 mi away. You ran your test to a server in Mumbai which was 700 miles away which was over a much greater distance. coastie

[piyushsingh]

k, i never looked into the server distance and missed the joke. :D

[coastie65]

Hi piyush, I probably could have worded that a little better.

[piyushsingh]

war of the words . hehe

[smax013]

coastie65 said:

Hi piyush, Sorry. What I was saying was that there were a lot of people that tested to a server that was only 35 mi away. You ran your test to a server in Mumbai which was 700 miles away which was over a much greater distance. coastie

Distance will not necessarily have an impact. It is more a function of the servers you go through and how well they handle traffic. You could be going to a server that is 35 miles away but gets routed through a crappy server/gateway and get horrible speeds yet go to a server that is thousands of miles away and get router through servers/gateways that all handle traffic really well and get great speeds. The issue with distance is that you are MORE likely to hit at least one server/gateway that might not be so great than when a route that has less distance to travel. Think of it like driving down the road. If there is only one red light between you and the store, you will have a low probability of hitting that ONE red light. If on the other hand, you go to a store that is on the other side of town and there are 50 traffic lights between you and the store, you have a MUCH higher probability of hitting a red light (frankly, you will likely hit more than one). When talking about this analogy, imagine that you can travel at infinite high speed between lights...so the only thing slowing you down is if you hit the red light.



The point is that a long distance means you have more opportunities for something to get in the way.



Now, admittedly, it will take more time for stuff to travel greater distances, but generally it will not be that much of a difference...any significant changes in speed will be more about bottlenecks in the route, not pure distance travelled.

[coastie65]

Thank You smax. :D Ironically, my speeds will fall off to about 12 megs down between here ( Richmond Va ) and San Fransisco, but pretty much remain the same between here and London England. I think I have a bunch of Chatty Kathy's between here and the Bay Area. coastie