Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Curve
I think there are a few torrent obsessed people here :P
No like when you join a game server you ping is shown some where on your screen. I used to have a ping of say 30 good 40 bad, but i still seem to have the same even though i changed my connection  |
Speed and Latency
There is a difference between Bandwidth (Speed) and Latency. The Speed (Measured in kbps or Kilobits per Second) is the maximum transfer of data in either direction (10240kbps down and 512kbps up on the 10meg service) Latency is the ammount of time (usually measured in milliseconds (thousandths of a second)) that it takes for a packet of data to get from your computer to wherever it's going. This is important for online games because the information on your machine about what the other players in-game are doing needs to be kept up to date. This is one reason why Dial-up really is no good for online games because of the translation of the digital data into an analogue format and back again, this increases the latency of the packet transfer by quite a lot. Broadband gets around this by sending purely digital signals down the line reducing latency greatly.
This is a basic explanation, I will dig out a 12 page essay from my College course on this if you want a good read
