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They Need To Stop Doing This
(kerala.party)
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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
1175 points (98.6% liked)
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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
Customer: So.. can we do that? Change the laws of physics? What congressman do we need to email?
That's cause they always have money in the lobbying budget to fix things.
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.
that would really help with playing video games
What's hollow core fibre.
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.
... wait, how does that work? Total internal reflection happens at the boundary to a lower index of refraction.
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
My dumb person guess is that it needs to be in a perfectly straight line.
There's probably more to it.
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.
https://mpl.mpg.de/research-at-mpl/russell-emeritus-group/research/about-pcf/hollow-core-pcf
How do you get internal reflectance with a hollow core?
You can't have total internal reflection within a hollow core, but that's not how they function.
That's fair.
Then you find out the real reason they need faster latency is because they're pinging the server for new data every 1ms
So can you give me an estimate for when you can solve that?
Anytime I run into that question I tell them if I could manage FTL comms I wouldn't be working here.
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]