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is it possible to translate latency between two computers to distance in KM?

Wannabe Nerd
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No it's not.

Electricity travels at the speed of light, so distance is rarely the deciding factor in network latency. Instead the speed and quality of intervening hardware, the amount of traffic on the network and the encoding/decoding of data will define what latency is.

AJFaraday
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  • Actually, electricity in copper wire travels about one-third of the speed of the speed of light in vacuum. – Ron Maupin Sep 08 '15 at 14:52
  • Fair point, although it's still not the thing which slows networks down. With so many larger factors changing the speed of a network it's not possible to do the typical speed/distance/time equations for network signals. – AJFaraday Sep 08 '15 at 14:53
  • Correct. Serialization/deserialization, queuing, etc. all factor into latency. If it was possible to calculate distance based on latency, we wouldn't have to contend with jitter since the latency would be fixed as the distance. – Ron Maupin Sep 08 '15 at 14:57