International latency post Seacom

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BCO

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Forgive me if this has been covered before - I did a quick search and didn't really find anything useful.

Most of the talk on MyBB regarding the Seacom cable seems to be centred around pricing and bandwidth packages. I'm far more interested (as a gamer) on how, if at all, Seacom will affect my international gaming experience. Is it likely that we will see lower latency?
 
BCO said:
Forgive me if this has been covered before - I did a quick search and didn't really find anything useful.

Most of the talk on MyBB regarding the Seacom cable seems to be centred around pricing and bandwidth packages. I'm far more interested (as a gamer) on how, if at all, Seacom will affect my international gaming experience. Is it likely that we will see lower latency?
Click to expand...

logically speaking it should improve the general latency of the entire South African network, but I guess it would really depend on whether the sub-network you are on is being fed by Seacom and other redundancies. By December next year the situation should be a 100 times better.
 
With a similar cable length to SAT3 (15,000km), I doubt that the latency would be much lower.
 
The good news is that the actual international latency should improve a bit, since some of what we currently see is actually congestion somewhere, or multiple router hops. The better connected we are (i.e. the more routes) and the faster these links, the less we'll see of this.

The bad news is that a large chunk of international latency is basic physics - it's the time it takes for the light in the cable to propagate from one side of the planet to the other. In the case of a cable from South Africa to Europe (e.g. SAT-3, or SEACOM, which are actually about the same length - you can see this on a globe), the round trip delay in the cable is between 150 ms and 200 ms. If you want to check the physics, you need to use the speed of light in glass optical fibre, not free space.
 
gmza said:
With a similar cable length to SAT3 (15,000km), I doubt that the latency would be much lower.
Click to expand...

Even on SAT3, you have Quality of Service shaping - the length shouldn't really matter all that much, the throughput and QoS restrictions matter imo
 
ads said:
The good news is that the actual international latency should improve a bit, since some of what we currently see is actually congestion somewhere, or multiple router hops. The better connected we are (i.e. the more routes) and the faster these links, the less we'll see of this.

The bad news is that a large chunk of international latency is basic physics - it's the time it takes for the light in the cable to propagate from one side of the planet to the other. In the case of a cable from South Africa to Europe (e.g. SAT-3, or SEACOM, which are actually about the same length - you can see this on a globe), the round trip delay in the cable is between 150 ms and 200 ms. If you want to check the physics, you need to use the speed of light in glass optical fibre, not free space.
Click to expand...

So a best case scenario is 150-200ms? That's still a lot better than my current 450-600ms.
 
DaLaw.za said:
Even on SAT3, you have Quality of Service shaping - the length shouldn't really matter all that much, the throughput and QoS restrictions matter imo
Click to expand...
who applies this shaping? the sat3 cable guys or telkom?

if they shape by default, what would the difference be between a shaped and unshaped account from SAIX?
 
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