Bureau of
Latency Enforcement
The speed of light is the law.
You cannot outrun it, and there is nowhere it does not reach.
You cannot outrun it, and there is nowhere it does not reach.
Light in optical fiber travels at roughly 200,000 kilometers per second, about two thirds of its vacuum speed. This sets a hard minimum on every network round trip on Earth. It is the only regulation in history with a 100 percent enforcement rate, zero staff, and no budget. The Bureau exists to take credit for this.
Select two locations. The Bureau will compute the lowest round-trip time physics permits over a straight fiber path, and what you should actually expect, given that fiber is never straight and routers exist.
Has a vendor, colleague, or benchmark claimed a round-trip time between these endpoints? Enter it below. The Bureau will determine whether physics was consulted.
A university statistics department reported that email could not be sent farther than 500 miles. Investigation confirmed the report was accurate. A misconfigured server was timing out connections after roughly 3 milliseconds, and 3 light-milliseconds is, indeed, about 500 miles. The mail server had accidentally become a speed-of-light measurement instrument.
The Bureau notes this is a true story from 1996, documented by the sysadmin involved, and considers it the finest latency enforcement action ever taken. The Bureau took no part in it, which is consistent with the Bureau's operating model.
Appeals may be filed with the universe directly. To date, all appeals have been denied without comment. The Bureau notes that quantum entanglement does not transmit information and has rejected 41,000 appeals citing it, several from physicists who should know better.
Marketing operates under a separate and more permissive physics. As long as the actual measured number respects Statute 299,792,458, the adjectives may do as they please.
The refractive index of optical fiber is about 1.5, so light in glass covers roughly 200 kilometers per millisecond. Hollow-core fiber and microwave links can do better, which is why high-frequency traders build them. The Bureau monitors these actors closely, in the sense of reading about them.
First, check whether you are far away. This is the leading cause of distance.