this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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They Need To Stop Doing This (kerala.party)
submitted 2 years ago by Albin9326@kerala.party to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] sudo@lemmy.today 121 points 2 years ago (6 children)

Customer: Why is there so much latency over my tunnel from us-east to us-west?

Me: checks latency seems pretty normal, what's the issue?

Customer: The latency is too much. Why is it not as fast as us-east-1 to us-east-2?

Me: They are near each other. Us-West is across the entire United States

Customer: Make faster

Me: This is the speed of light. And over copper it's about 2/3 that

Customer: hmm are you sure that's as fast as it can go?

Me: Well, unless we change the laws of physics your not going to get any better latency

[–] brygphilomena@lemmy.world 57 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Customer: So.. can we do that? Change the laws of physics? What congressman do we need to email?

[–] orbitz@lemmy.ca 11 points 2 years ago

That's cause they always have money in the lobbying budget to fix things.

[–] sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.works 47 points 2 years ago (2 children)

For the low price of billions and a decade of work they could build out hollow core fiber coast to coast to get the last 1/3 c.

[–] affiliate@lemmy.world 10 points 2 years ago

that would really help with playing video games

[–] spez@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What's hollow core fibre.

[–] sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.works 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Its a type of fiber optic cable where the center of the cable is literally hollow. Normal fiber uses a glass core. Light passing through glass also travels about 2/3 the speed of the light since the speed of light is only constant in an empty vacuum. With hollow core, light is no longer passing through glass so its speed is much closer to the actual speed of light.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

... wait, how does that work? Total internal reflection happens at the boundary to a lower index of refraction.

[–] sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 years ago

I don't know the physics well enough, but here is some general information.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic-crystal_fiber

https://www.rp-photonics.com/hollow_core_fibers.html

High Group Velocity, Low Latency Signal Transmission

The group velocity of guided light is usually close to the vacuum velocity of light. This implies substantially lower latency for signal transmission through hollow-core fibers.

[–] Croquette@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

My dumb person guess is that it needs to be in a perfectly straight line.

There's probably more to it.

[–] sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 years ago

Looks like it comes in spools.

https://www.ixblue.com/store/ixf-hcf-10-100-950/

I don't know the physics of it. I posted some info for the parent you responded to. My understanding is the applied physics is different from traditional fiber.

The main physical principle behind propagation of light in conventional optical fibers is total internal reflection (TIR). However, engineering of optical materials with features on the scale of the wavelength of light offers many new possibilities for manipulating light. In particular, some microstructured fibres make it possible to guide light by a mechanism different from total internal reflection. In these fibres, light is trapped in the core by an out-of-plane band-gap, which appears over a range of axial wavevectors and prevents propagation of light in the microstructured cladding [Cregan (1999)], allowing guided modes to form in the central hollow core.

https://mpl.mpg.de/research-at-mpl/russell-emeritus-group/research/about-pcf/hollow-core-pcf

[–] Cort@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

How do you get internal reflectance with a hollow core?

[–] AffineConnection@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You can't have total internal reflection within a hollow core, but that's not how they function.

[–] Cort@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

That's fair.

[–] stratoscaster@lemmy.zip 34 points 2 years ago

Then you find out the real reason they need faster latency is because they're pinging the server for new data every 1ms

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 17 points 2 years ago

So can you give me an estimate for when you can solve that?

[–] simpleslipeagle@lemmynsfw.com 12 points 2 years ago

Anytime I run into that question I tell them if I could manage FTL comms I wouldn't be working here.

[–] xantoxis@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Eh, sometimes they're right about this one though. It's true that a request traveling near light speed is as fast as it can possibly be, but what if it's 17 requests? Sometimes you can fix latency by doing fewer transactions.

edit: love a downvote with no reply. Just "No!" [stomps feet]