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Depends on the location of you and the server. Obviously it can't go faster than the speed of light, but it can go much slower, since it doesn't go add the crow (or photon) flies, and more of in a zig zag path, and it has to traverse several photon/electron translation hardware hops (aka routers and switches), and there's typically some packet loss and buffer bloat to contend with as well. The speed of light in fiber is slower than in a vacuum, to be fair, but the latency you experience is marred more, not by the raw speed of the photon in fiber, which is still quite fast (certainly faster than you or I can run), but by all the other reasons why you don't get anywhere near that theoretical maximum speed.

From me to Australia should be ~37 milliseconds if we look at the speed of light, but it's closer to 175 milliseconds (meaning a ping of ~350). Nevermind the latency of being on wifi adds to that.

https://www.pingdom.com/blog/theoretical-vs-real-world-speed...

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Hikikomori 2 days ago | parent [-]

There are many problems with this article, it's for laymen so simplifies things but it's also factually incorrect. Fiber is usually next to roads or railways, which usually do not zigzag. Modern router/switches have a forwarding delay of micro/nanoseconds. The beam in a single mode fiber does not bounce like a pinball, it doesn't bounce at all, hence the name.

Ping is largely a product of distance and the speed (200km/s). It's not the distance a bird would fly but it can be close to it sometimes. And then the internet is a collection of separate networks that are not fully connected, so even if your target is in the next building your traffic might go through another bigger city as that is where the ISPs peer.

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burnt-resistor 2 days ago | parent [-]

You're still missing many other significant factors besides distance. There are many conditions that affect latency, but on the minimum theoretical value possible, it's mostly dominated by the slowest path technology's single channel bandwidth. The other factors that reduce performance include:

- Network conditions

- High port/traffic oversubscription ratio

- QoS/packet service classification, i.e., discriminatory tweaks that stop, slow, or speed up certain kinds of traffic contrary to the principles of net neutrality

- Packet forwarding rate compared to physical link speed

- Network gear, client, and server tuning and (mis)configuration

- Signal booster/repeater latency

- And too many more to enumerate exhaustively

As such, point-to-point local- and internet-spanning configuration troubleshooting and optimization is best decided empirically through repeated experimentation, sometimes assisted by netadmin tools when there is access to intermediary infrastructure.

	▲	Hikikomori 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I wasn't enumerating all sources of latency. I wrote largely, as after some amount of distance all the other factors are not really relevant in a normally functioning network (one without extreme congestion).