Boston to New York is 215mi or a 430 mile round trip. At 200 miles up where they intend to put the satellites orbiting over major cities, it's going to be about 1000 mile round trip.
I thought that the US servers for most games are in the middle of the country to get the best average ping for a cross-country audience. Blizzard is like Chicago and Texas.
> Boston to New York is 215mi or a 430 mile round trip.
Assuming terrestrial lines travel as the crow flies, which is not all that likely (but probably not too far off).
> At 200 miles up where they intend to put the satellites orbiting over major cities, it's going to be about 1000 mile round trip.
Other people here are noting that fiber signals travel at ~70% the speed of light, while radio waves travel at very close to the speed of light. If that's true, it puts the optimal time for land based optical communication at ~3.3ms[1] ms, while the optimal time for a low orbit satellite at ~5.4ms[2] (if I didn't screw up the math). That's slower, but not by a whole lot, so it might even be better than you're predicting.
Also, are people actually getting sub 4ms round trip times between Boston and New York? If not, then the difference here might be entirely subsumed by other factors.
Nope, the biggest AWS region is in Virginia (as well as a bunch of others, energy is cheap there). There are also lots of datacenters in Dallas, TX and San Jose, CA. NYC has a lot of connectivity (throughout the northeast, and transatlantic) but the cost of real estate is so high that it is uneconomical to operate lots of large datacenters there.
The majority of the population in the US is in the eastern half (1/3 in states on the East coast), so you don't actually decrease median latency by putting datacenters in the geographic center: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_popula...
That doesn't disagree with what I said. The majority is still in the East (the mean is East of the geographic center), and you don't want to optimize for average latency anyway. You'll get the best median latency with two datacenters by putting one on the mid-Atlantic coast (~180M people East of the Mississippi) and one on the mid-Pacific coast (another 50M in Pacific Coast states). That means the latency for ~2/3 of the population is way lower, and the max latency is still about the same as putting them in the center of the country.
Not usually. In my experience, they usually follow the typical popular datacenter areas e.g. East Coast/West Coast. I've mostly only seen really popular games offer Central locations like Dallas/Chicago. But it's getting a lot better now that vultr (COD uses them) and other VPS providers get more and more locations.
I thought that the US servers for most games are in the middle of the country to get the best average ping for a cross-country audience. Blizzard is like Chicago and Texas.