I’m curious: who uses the Internet with the highest real-world minimum latency, where are they, and how are they connected?
It looks like most continents with fiber links of some kind have latency to other hosts around the world of less than about 500ms. I imagine remote locations like McMurdo Station served only by satellites have much higher latency. I’ve heard of military stations in Alaska served by a chain of terrestrial wireless relays that have terrible latency. I wonder whether that’s as bad as it gets, and how bad it really is in day-to-day usage. Mostly I’d love to see some actual numbers.
Is satellite pretty much the worst? Is there anyone using some kind of maritime VHF link that’s even worse?
Happy to consider high rate/high latency links as well as low rate links e.g. 9600 or 1200 baud for like remote SCADA where applicable.
Who has literally the worst Internet latency?
by comparison, the fiber connection is 45ms.
It's incredible how much stuff on the modern web utterly fails with that kind of latency. Every "framework library" 200 byte xfer builds the chance that something wont load and the rest will crash. Not to mention the ISP's charming habit of picking random connections to either hijack for their "your bandwidth has run out but you can pay us to get unthrottled" message, or their random RST injection into streams (how they implement the throttles).
back when, long distance low rate audio modems rarely got worse than 200ms, as far as i recall. Packet network forwarders could make that much worse.