Will latency to Europe improve with the EASSY cable?

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gregquinn

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Ok great so we are getting the EASSY cable now...

But when will our ADSL be routed directly through it, and when will we notice a difference in latency?
Will there be a difference or will be forever stuck with bad latency to anywhere in Europe? :cry:
 
it may improve. but from what i have read on here it wouldn't go down into the 40s.
 
Does anyone know when ISPs will start using the EASSY cable? Which ISPs will use it?
 
Latency, I suppose, is the big issue? Tried some gaming through international and I saw my own bullets passing me after I had run past them.
 
FPS are unlikely to ever be playable internationally, if things improve to ~200ms it would make a big difference for MMOs and RTS games. I am not sure how much below that is realistic.
 
Phenomenon said:
FPS are unlikely to ever be playable internationally, if things improve to ~200ms it would make a big difference for MMOs and RTS games. I am not sure how much below that is realistic.
Click to expand...
The laws of physics dictate about 180ms to get a signal down the fibre from ZA to Europe. Unless we start communicating with signals that travel faster than the speed of light this is unlikely to improve.
 
The round-trip latency to Europe is around 150ms (Cape Town to Portugal via SAT-3). EASSy, if routed via one the cables through the Mediterranean, will give about the same latency from Jo'burg to Italy or France. These latencies are purely a measure of the speed of light in glass (optical fibre) and the distance. Other than towing Europe closer to South Africa, nothing will make these shorter.

Of course, it all depends where the server is that you are playing on, and, of course, the inherent latency and variation in the latency in the access you are using (fibre is better than copper is better than wireless, generally). Obviously, you want an ISP that is using the shortest routes via different cables to each place you want to connect to, and obviously you don't want an ISP that uses only one cable, as we've seen recently.
 
The 2 biggest factors that affect latency are:

1. The distance/length of the cable or cables connecting you from South Africa to Europe.
Light travels at a finite speed. The greater the distance, the longer it will take for the light (which in this case represents signals or packets of data travelling accross a fibre optic cable) to get from RSA to Europe. There is no getting away from this. There will always be a minimum latency (which is about 150ms I believe for the RSA to Europe leg, coast to coast) which is directly proportional to the distance the light needs to travel.

2. The number of hops on the path from RSA to Europe.
Each hop is an actual router or similar device that adds a few milliseconds to the latency, which is the processing overhead as your packets sit in a queue on the router waiting to be processed PLUS the actual time your packets pass through the CPU of the router for processing and routing according to tables setup on each router. So service providers have to ensure that their networks and cables are optimised and routed in an intelligent and efficient way, avoiding unncessary hops and not doing stupid things to increase the number of hops from South Africa to Europe.

Sometimes it is unavoidable to take weird routes that add additional latency and/or additional hops, due to political reasons, financial reasons, geographic reasons, etc...

Routing and building efficient networks is a dark art of its own. It's not as simple as connecting point A to point B, though end-users often perceive it as such.

I don't think EASSY will bring down the latency, unless they've found a shorter route through the Ocean from RSA to Europe. We'll never know, as such information is often confidential, and highly guarded. Even so, the difference won't be by much. However, having more cables like SEACOM and EASSY means that each cable will have to handle less traffic overall (split between the 2), which means you packets spend less time in processing queues on routers (shorter queues), meaning that your latency comes closer to the theoretical limits imposed by the laws of physics.
 
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gregquinn said:
Ok great so we are getting the EASSY cable now...

But when will our ADSL be routed directly through it, and when will we notice a difference in latency?
Will there be a difference or will be forever stuck with bad latency to anywhere in Europe?
Click to expand...

Well it is all ISP and line quality dependant for the end user. If you currently have a good ADSL connection with decent latency (10 - 50ms) you might see a small difference. There is so many factors involved. The ISP you use must have enough bandwidth available on the EASSY cable to provide to the end users with service and also not oversell and cause a bottleneck for the users that connect via their network.
 
iCubed.Saajid said:
I don't think EASSY will bring down the latency, unless they've found a shorter route through the Ocean from RSA to Europe. We'll never know, as such information is often confidential, and highly guarded. Even so, the difference won't be by much. However, having more cables like SEACOM and EASSY means that each cable will have to handle less traffic overall (split between the 2), which means you packets spend less time in processing queues on routers (shorter queues), meaning that your latency comes closer to the theoretical limits imposed by the laws of physics.
Click to expand...

It depends what you're comparing with... it'll be about the same as SAT3 to Europe, but don't forget that Seacom routes traffic to Europe via India. Anyone got any recent stats on latency to Europe via Seacom (preferably not during the outages!!)?
 
hmm..

According to plate tectonics.. Africa is slowly moving closer to europe and in a couple of millions years or more.. africa will crash into europe.

so maybe then your latency will improve as the distance will be shorter.. but then the line will be crashed under the weight of the new mountain range formed by the collision and you will be dead...

and then maybe telkom will be offering stable 20 Meg connections
 
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