Connection, servers and latency from Australia: worked examples

Worked arithmetic on distance, latency and server choice · Last reviewed 16 September 2026

Australian players of overseas-hosted games meet a limit that no upgrade removes: distance. A faster plan does not shorten the cable to Europe. This page separates bandwidth from latency, works out the floor that geography sets, and lists the changes that do and do not move the number.

Quick answer

Bandwidth decides how fast the game downloads; latency decides how the game feels. Choose the nearest server region the game offers, use a cable rather than Wi-Fi if you can, and measure your own latency instead of relying on anyone else's figures. If the only server is on the other side of the world, a floor of well over a tenth of a second round trip is physics, not a fault.

Two different numbers

Bandwidth (throughput): How much data the connection moves per second, in Mbps. It decides how long the initial download and each patch take. Online matches themselves use very little bandwidth.
Latency (ping): How long a single packet takes to reach the server and come back, in milliseconds. It decides how immediate the game feels. This is the number that matters once the game is installed.
Jitter: Variation in latency from one packet to the next. Steady latency of 180 ms is usually more playable than latency swinging between 60 ms and 200 ms.
Packet loss: Packets that never arrive. Small amounts produce the stutter that players often mistake for a low frame rate, which is a different problem with a different cause.

The floor that distance sets

Signals in optical fibre travel at roughly two-thirds of the speed of light in vacuum — on the order of 200,000 km per second. From that, a minimum round trip can be estimated for any route: the distance there and back, divided by that speed. Real connections are slower, because cables do not follow great-circle paths and because every router, exchange and submarine landing adds processing time. The arithmetic below is therefore a floor, not a prediction.

Approximate great-circle distances from Sydney, with the round-trip minimum implied by fibre propagation alone. Real latency is always higher.
Route from Sydney	Approximate distance	Implied minimum round trip
Within Sydney	Tens of kilometres	Under 1 ms of propagation; access technology dominates
Perth	About 3,300 km	About 33 ms
Singapore	About 6,300 km	About 63 ms
Tokyo	About 7,800 km	About 78 ms
Los Angeles	About 12,000 km	About 120 ms
Frankfurt	About 16,500 km	About 165 ms

The practical reading of that table is simple. A game whose only servers are in Europe cannot feel the same from Australia as it does from Germany, and no product sold to you can change that. What can change is which server you choose, if the game offers a choice, and how much your own equipment adds on top of the floor.

What the access technology adds

Before the signal leaves the country it has already crossed your home network and your access connection, and those contribute differently depending on the technology involved. Fibre to the premises adds very little. Copper-based and cable-based connections generally add more, and can add more again when the line is congested in the evening. Fixed wireless varies with conditions and load at the tower. A link through a geostationary satellite adds a substantial and unavoidable amount, because the signal travels tens of thousands of kilometres up and back before it goes anywhere useful — which is why satellite connections suit downloads far better than real-time matches.

Inside the house, the two common additions are Wi-Fi and contention. Wi-Fi adds a variable amount that grows with distance from the access point and with the number of devices sharing it. Contention is the rest of the household: a large download or several video streams running during a match will show up as jitter more often than as a lower speed.

Measuring your own numbers

Use the game's own indicator first. Most online games display a ping figure. That number is measured against the server you are actually playing on, which makes it the most relevant one available.
Compare across server regions. If the client offers a choice, join each region once and record the figure. This takes five minutes and settles the question permanently.
Test on a cable. Connect the machine to the router by Ethernet once, purely as a test. The difference between that and Wi-Fi is the amount your wireless network is contributing.
Test at two times of day. Afternoon and 9 pm. A gap between them points at congestion rather than at distance.

Worked example

Three households, one game with servers in Europe and in Asia.

Fibre to the premises in inner Melbourne, wired. The Asian server reads comfortably under the European one, and the gap is close to what the distance arithmetic predicts. The correct action is simply to keep using the nearer region and stop investigating.

Copper-based connection in a regional town, over Wi-Fi. Afternoon figures are acceptable; at 9 pm both regions get worse together, and jitter rises. Because both regions degrade equally, the cause is local rather than international. A cable to the router removes part of it, and the rest follows the household's evening load.

Satellite connection on a rural property. The floor is high on every region, and no server choice changes it materially. The honest conclusion is that this connection suits slower-paced games; it is not a fault to be fixed and not something a purchase will improve.

What helps, and what does not

Changes ranked by whether they actually move the latency figure
Change	Effect on latency
Choosing a geographically nearer server region	The largest single improvement available, where the game offers a choice
Ethernet cable instead of Wi-Fi	Removes wireless variability; usually reduces jitter more than average latency
Pausing downloads and streams during a match	Reduces jitter and loss caused by a saturated link
Moving closer to the access point, or using 5 GHz	Helps where Wi-Fi is the weak link
A faster speed tier	Shortens downloads; does not shorten the distance a packet travels
Buying in-game items	No effect on latency whatsoever
Routing through a VPN	Adds a hop and usually increases latency. It can help only in the specific case where your provider's default route to the server is unusually poor, and that is something to measure rather than assume

Claims to treat carefully

Products advertised as reducing ping, optimising a network stack or providing a "gaming route" are making a claim that is testable, and the test is straightforward: measure the game's own ping figure before and after, at the same time of day, on the same server. Australian Consumer Law applies to those claims like any other, and the ACCC is the regulator for misleading conduct in trade.

Be sceptical too of any download offered as a performance improver for a specific game from anywhere other than the publisher. That category overlaps heavily with the software discussed on the account safety page.

The checklist

Server regions in the client listed, with a ping figure recorded for each.
The nearest usable region selected as the default.
One wired test completed to quantify what Wi-Fi contributes.
Afternoon and evening figures compared, to separate local congestion from distance.
Household downloads scheduled outside playing hours.
Expectations set from the distance arithmetic, so that a geographically explained figure is not treated as a fault.
No purchase made on a promise of lower latency without measuring before and after.