The Problem

Darrell has been combating misinformation for a very long time. He was an advisor to a reasearch team at Washington University that was working on server acceleration in order to reduce lag. The first thing all gamers try to do when they experience lag while gaming is to blame it on the server. It's not so much the server as it is the latency, as Darrell tried to point out to this research team. Let me explain.

There are several factors that create Latency, or Lag:
- Network Congestion
- Excessive Hops
- Inconsistencies in the connection
- Local computer-related issues
- Server-side issues

This list is what most people are dealing with when they experience lag. According to one of our amazing politicians, the internet is a series of tubes and you can’t just dump things in these tubes or they get all plugged up. While that statement may be completely ignorant, there is a sliver of truth. Network congestion can severely increase your latency. In addition, excessive hops can also increase latency. I think a visual is in order:

Every one of those yellow dots represents what is called a hop, or a transition from one internet node to the next. Sometimes these hops can not only take you from state to state, but through several different backbones. Each of these transitions adds a significant amount of latency and in between, your gaming packets are also having to deal with all the other traffic of the internet (i.e. P2P Sharing, Web Surfing, Email, etc.)

Before you come to me saying that you have some sort of Mega-connection to your house, like an OC192 line, consider this: Capacity does not matter when the latency is so high due to congestion and excessive hopping. Your standard DSL connection could out-perform a fiber connection if the fiber connection is congested and taking a hop-happy route. For more on this subject, read Stuart Cheshire dissertation on Capacity vs. Latency called "It's the Latency, Stupid."