Q. for the geeks

Annika1980 wrote:
We've all seen TV newscasts that show a reporter live in Iraq being
interviewed by the CNN anchor back home in the ATL. There is always a
few seconds delay since it takes time for the satellite signal to make
it's way around the world.

OK, so I turn on my Nintendo Wii and I'm playing Mario Kart online
with people from England, Brazil, China, Australia and Japan. I'm
totally kicking ass as we all enjoy a fast-paced game of live racing
action with no delay. How is this possible?

Is it because of the way the WWW is connected? Is it really hard-
wired all the way around? I would think that the signal would have to
hit a satellite at some point.

Networks use satellite for portability reasons. They need a relatively
small number of high bandwidth links that can run out of a truck from
virtually anywhere.

The internet (backbone) uses land/submarine lines (esp. fibre optic) for
international and national connection for reasons of extreme bandwidth,
cost and low latency. Some microwave (tower to tower) for local / rural
connection still at pretty high BW; and copper coax. Low latency is
important for high speed networks.

There are huge fibre optic networks covering the world and if you google
about you'll find maps of them. They carry the major bulk of the
internet traffic.

There are some satellite based internet connections, eg: rural users who
need higher bandwidth than the telephone provides. In these systems,
typically the upload is over the phone (URL's don't need much BW) and
the downlink is over satellite. Though for uploading a large file or
e-mail it will take a while... the performance of these systems on the
downlink side is often less than 1 Mbit/s.

(Vice cable modem service of up to 60 Mbit/s here; and over 100 Mbit/s
fibre to the house service in some countries (S. Korea, Japan, Taiwan...)).