I've got family in California, in the Santa Cruz mountains just outside silicon valley to the south of San Jose/Campbell. For that location satellite internet is the only option available to them.

Beautiful area, very close to big cities but feels like small-town life. Terrible internet service.

I live in Seoul, Korea and totally love the availability of high speed internet here. The government subsidized its development starting in the late 90s and it has really paid off. Gigabit internet nearly everywhere these days. If you play any local online game, your ping times are as low as they can go. Download massive files from anywhere in the world in a blink. But play online games on European servers and you've got some serious latency. I play Elder Scrolls Online fairly frequently. With their North American server I get between 180 - 220 ms pings. With their European server it's consistently 300+. If you want to keep global players at 60ms pings, establishing regional servers is the only option.

But play online games on European servers and you've got some serious latency. I play Elder Scrolls Online fairly frequently. With their North American server I get between 180 - 220 ms pings. With their European server it's consistently 300+. If you want to keep global players at 60ms pings, establishing regional servers is the only option.

That is unluckily unavoidable. The above considerations about the speed of light and distance are right in theory, but in practicw they can only serve as a lower bound (that is, what is theoretically possiböe according to physics).

Reality looks somewhat different insofar as you have two major land lines which go east approximarely in a kinda straight way, but they go through the KGB first. And then you have the southern route with 3 (or 4, depending on whether or not someone sabotages them this week) submarine cables through the gulf of Oman and then via India... which is wayyyyyyyyy longer, nowhere near a straight line. So obviously, oberall latency isn't great, and the route is somewhat perma-congested, so peak latencies can really stink.