In article SK5ae.8698$NU4.1859@attbi_s22, Jay Honeck wrote:
My regular gaming friends live in
England, Finland, Germany and the Czech Republic. Unfortunately, ping
times are too bad to the US, I'd like to be able to play games with
friends over there.

For those of us past 45, can you please explain what that phrase means?
What's a "ping time"?

Think of a submarine's SONAR. It goes 'ping'. The ping bounces off
another submarine, and back to a transducer on the submarine that did
the pinging. You can measure your distance to the other sub by measuring
this time. The ping time is the round-trip time it took for the
ping to go from your sub, be reflected off the other sub, and get back
to your sub. Or think of how DME measures distances - by sending a
signal to the DME station, which then returns it, and then the box in
your panel works out the distance to the station from the round trip
time.

On the internet, your ping time is how long the round trip is from your
computer to a remote computer. On a LAN, ping times are measured in
fractions of milliseconds. On the internet, on hosts within a few
hundred miles, ping times will be in tens of milliseconds. On the
internet, to a host that's thousands of miles away, the ping time will
be in hundreds of milliseconds. Over a satellite link, ping times may be
in excess of a second. (Ever seen those live satellite linkups on TV
where there's quite an obvious pause from when the interviewer finishes
asking the question, to when the interviewee starts responding?)

On the internet, ping time (or latency) is affected by many factors,
such as how full your internet pipe is, what the transfer speed of the
internet pipe is, how big the packet is you send etc. It is also
affected by the speed of light through fibreoptics and the number of
routers and repeaters the data must pass through. Therefore, ping times
between Europe and the US - although more than adequate for web
browsing, chatting on IRC etc. are often not good enough for fast-paced
action games.

To play a highly interactive 3D game, which simulates some real world
situation, having a low ping time is important, because the actions of
the different players must be reasonably synchronized for the game to
make sense. For some online games, ping time is less important - think
of a turn-based strategy game.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"