What is limiting internet speed between continents?

I am a gamer. If you play games much you also know that those big companies who make online games will divide the whole community to several parts regionally.

I wonder nowadays, what is limiting the internet speed between regions. Is it technically very difficult to solve this problem, or it is the ISPs that are hindering the improvement of speed due to economic reason.

 

Are you asking about speed or latency [ping], because most ISPs are offering speeds good enough to play anything these days on any server in any part of the world. Latency on the other hand is still influenced by various factors: distance from server, hops to the server, hardware, etc.

 

Maybe it's ping I guess? e.g I play Starcraft 2 (Multi-player RTS) or Counter Strike:GO (Multi-player FPS), if you play on other region's server, the lag is huge and unplayable.

Why does distance matter since data transfer is in digital and theoretically in light speed if I'm not wrong?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_fiber#Index_of_refraction

+ Data doesn't travel directly between you and the server. There are many hops which you can see when you do a traceroute.

 

Thank you Wroll. This totally answered my question.

100ms is nothing for normal usage of internet but may be considerable lag for multi-player gaming which involves constant interactions.