Through TekSyndicate, Linus and a Tiger based tech show that shall not be named, I've gained a good amount of knowledge on PC hardware. However, I still know little about certain aspects of the internet.
A number of years ago when I was on a modem connection, I could get pings as low as 5ms on local game servers, however nowadays I'd get 29ms at best when connected to a router by Ethernet. A lot of my friends noticed the same thing. Is this something to do with the nature of routers, or is it to do with ISPs and the growth of the internet.
Basically, is there anything I can do to reduce my ping or is it based off of my ISP?
in a perfect world, your latency would be the amount of time it would take for a bit to go from your computer to their computer. this would be close to the speed of light. (coax cable is ~66% the speed of light. copper cable is ~95%).
however, those packets of data have to go though a wide variety of switches all over the united states (or even over seas).these are similar to a home switch, but just much much larger and with much higher performance. the switches have to look at the packets and figure out where to forward it to. (these routing protocols include is-is, ospf and eigrp... and maybe even rip/ripv2 if your destination is a larger business.)
all of these switches and routing protocol add more delay in your packet getting to the destination.
since the speed of electricity is so fast, it doesnt make much sense that distance would increase latency (at least to any noticeable amount). however... the farther the destination is, the more of these routing / switching stations your traffic has to go though.
as for the latency you are noticing... MAYBE the swithing overhead was less with plain old telephone service (pots)... a 29ms ping is very fast. if i had to guess, the 5ms time when you had dial up was because the server was VERY VERY close to you. like you probably had only 2 or 3 hops from you to the server.
See I used to consistently be 20-30ms less than I am now, I was just curious if I could do anything about it. Thanks for the response though, a lot of detail there. I feel educated!
The only thing that you could do (short of moving right next to a major data centre), would be to switch to another ISP that might have lower latency (however, normally the isp will not have a big impact). make sure you play on servers that are close to you.
Run a tracert to the server IP address. What you need to do is take the port number off the IP address, watch where it bounces to in the list, and then figure out which bounce takes the longest by reading the millisecond count.