Think of a highway that cars can travel on. If you expand the number of lanes more cars can travel at once (more data per second). But for an individual car, it doesn't arrive any earlier (ping stays the same).
Improvements in digital communication allow more data to be sent at once, but it's not going any faster.
I like this metaphor. Improvements in Internet infrastructure (so traffic lights and metered on ramps) have improved travel time for individual cars (ping) but nowhere near as drastic of a difference as more lanes (bandwidth) has seen.
Yes but we invented ways to build bigger highways, why can't we invent faster cars?
Because the cars top speed is already the speed of light, and going beyond that is a bit sci-fi. There’s some room for improvements with speed it can move between switches it runs into as it goes, but only so much. Think of that like hitting a toll booth, and we find ways to speed up processing time at the booth, but then when you leave you’re back to speed of light like before.
top speed is already the speed of light, and going beyond that is a bit sci-fi.
It's a lot more than a bit sci-fi. It breaks causality. If things can travel faster than the speed of light effects can happen before their causes when viewed from the right reference frame.
. If things can travel faster than the speed of light effects can happen before their causes when viewed from the right reference frame.
Could one of those effects theoretically be time travel?
think of it more as posting a comment on reddit and getting replies before you even finish lol
I'm talking about something like a light turns on before you close the switch that turns it on. This happens for some observers, but for others the light turns on after you close the switch. Causality (i.e., closing the switch being the reason the light turns on) no longer works for anything.
Oh, ok, thanks for the clarification.
Pretty sure the one limiting ping is not the speed of light but bottlenecks along the way (netwotk? Routing? Etc). If it's the speed of light then halfway across the world should be under 100ms, but that's not the case. Also between somewhere near, it's still 50ms+ where if it's speed of light it should be about 2ms.
So the question would be why invention of improving the booth is not as groundbreaking as the invention of bigger highways?
It's really really difficult to get past the speed of light, even light in a glass fibre wire. Basically the only improvements were made at the point where electrical signals are switched into optical and vice versa.
Not to be pedantic (proceeds to be pedantic), but it's actually very much impossible to go past the speed of light.
Signals, even through glass fibre, don't travel at the speed of light.
They bounce around and reflect and don't travel in a straight line, so even though the information itself is at the speed of light, since it's never going in a straight line, the overall propagation time across a fibre optic cable is actually much slower than the speed of light.
... since we're being pedantic
it's going at the speed of light for the medium (optical fiber), which is less than the speed of light in a vacuum.
but it's actually very much impossible to go past the speed of light.
(adding on, not disagreeing)
Because "the speed of light" isn't really dependent on light, but vice versa. It's the speed of propagation of cause and effect. Causality. C. Light is just one of the things we measure at that speed.
What if we could make something go faster than cause and effect? That's a nonsensical statement. How would one measure that? You send something (cause) and then judge the return time (the reflection, i.e. the effect).
If we're traveling at 0.5c and we shine a flashlight ahead of us, how fast does it go? Cause-and-effect. C. We're still measuring the time it takes for the beam of light we shine to reflect and come back. It travels at the speed of cause-and-effect relative to the origin of the cause.
That mostly makes sense, but since light is affected by stuff, how do we know it moves at exactly the speed of causality? Suppose you had a neutrino or something moving at light speed but was unaffected by the material it's traveling through. Wouldn't that let something go faster than light speed through an imperfect vacuum?
we'll get a good bit of improvement with fiber made in space cuz in low gravity its possible to make more optimal glass with less defects so we need less repeaters along the fiber
Thank goodness our space factory is only a few years away from completion
Great analogy, we need more ELI5 like this
Data can only flow so fast, they've just added volume. That said, latency has decreased over the years with more direct pathways and more fiber on the grid.
That's a good way to put it.
Imagine you invent a way to send two messages at the same time on a single wire: You've doubled how MUCH information you can send, but it still is sent at the same speed.
That, a lot. The reductions in ping mostly have come from faster switches and relays, and the increased number of connections that can give a more direct route.
Imagine you invent a way to send two messages at the same time on a single wire: You've doubled how MUCH information you can send, but it still is sent at the same speed.
That's a really good ELI5. I think the confusion comes from the fact that when we have better bandwidth, we call it faster internet. Is it really faster though?
It's not faster time to first byte (TTFB), but it's faster time to last byte (TTLB), and whatever you're loading isn't really loaded until last byte.
Yes. Any amount of data greater than a single packet moves through the network much faster.
Yes. It's faster in the sense that a team of people can clean a house faster than one person can. Or a fire hose will fill a pool faster than a garden hose.
It's a faster bandwidth not a faster velocity. But it is a factor of time (megabits / seconds)
Is it really faster though?
It depends on the use case. Yes, it's faster to download web pages, programs/apps, large files, etc., because you have to wait until those things are finished downloading before you can use them, mostly.
Sometimes faster directly relates to better quality, like with streaming media, because it means better quality video frames can be sent to you faster, and therefore the downloads can keep up with the speed of the video.
Also, being faster, and better in general, means much less chance of traffic jams. Though gaming ping times can't get better than their theoretical minimum, they can always get worse if the network is congested. Higher bandwidth vastly reduces the chance of congestion. So your gaming ping time is more reliable and repeatable -- and therefore on average, a bit faster compared to a congested network.
All in all, more bandwidth is generally better in many ways. Faster is just a simple, one-word way to summarize all these benefits, even if there is a bit of nuance when it comes to the gaming use-case in particular.
For most purposes, it is. Online gaming/ping testing is a little unique in that it specifically has extremely small data packets that need to individually reach their destination as quickly as possible, while most every other internet application from browsing pages to streaming 4k video doesn't actually care that much about how much time it takes any individual data packet to arrive, but that more of them can arrive at once.
It doesn't matter if it takes 1 extra second for your video stream data to reach you if, when it does arrive, there's a bandwidth capacity that hands you 100GB of data at the same time. Your video can have all the stuff you haven't even watched up to yet be downloaded and ready to view well in advance.
What a lot of people who play online games don't realise is that they don't really need that much data to function. A video file has so much rich information containing all the colours and sounds and so on, high volume stuff, but an online game doesn't send that kind of data. What an online game generally does is have a central server running its own version of the game, and each user's copy is sending barebones information like "User's position is now [x,y,z] with rotation angle [a] degrees, plus an input for an attack" which the server runs on its version to calculate what happens.
The car analogy is that your average game is a sports bike, small and mostly limited only by the speed limits of the highway it drives on, while your average video stream is a fleet of buses which really don't want to have to be stacked end-to-end if possible, they'd love to travel alongside each other and arrive simultaneously.
This is why the analogy is a little misleading, as "faster" in terms of cars does refer to each vehicle's individual speed, but we never talk about the speed of individual data as "fast".
Incidentally, that bandwidth stuff is why if your home has a limited bandwidth and someone is trying to online game, someone's watching youtube on their phone, and someone's got Netflix on the TV, no one should ever be requesting the person gaming to stop if there's bandwidth trouble. All the bottlenecking will be from people downloading files and streaming content.
Also better geolocation of data. Data is now often replicated all over the world and put in a location that's as close to the user as possible. Less distance (usually) means less latency
But we don't transmit multiple things at the same time. It's still a serial data stream, is it not? Wouldn't it be more accurate to suggest, for example, that we now spend less time speaking each word of the message, i.e. that we're talking faster?
by that construction, Ping is how fast the words travel through the air. no matter how fast you talk, that information takes just as long to get to the listeners ears. Just because you speak more words doesn’t make those words travel faster. You are talking faster increasing the amount of information, but that information isn’t traveling from x to y any faster. Theres just more of it.
We do both.
We do signal multiplex that send more data at the same time, and better algorithms and technologies allow us to multiplex more at a time.
And yes we also do stuff like use higher frequencies to send more data.
Another advancement is also being able to run parallel data streams but keep them in sync to speed up serial data
Could probably say that the words per minute has gotten really fast (absurdly fast), and we're saying multiple sentences at the same time. But again that the travel time of those words is the same.
A slower example might be listening to Morse code at 5wpm vs 30wpm. Exact same concept.
Think about it like taking a picture and cutting it into 4 equal sections and then sending those at the same time. Now repeat that with each new piece until you have as many pieces as you can send at once. You just need to write on the back which piece goes where so the recipient can put it back together, and now you can send the same picture in a fraction of the time.
Electricity still travel can’t faster than speed of light.
propagation times in fiber are (microscopically) worse than copper. but fiber can have substantially longer runs without switch gear that adds latency.
Light in fiber is roughly 0.7c, so maybe if we have a conveyor belt of fiber travelling at 0.3c in the same direction as the light, we can achieve speed of light in a vacuum 🤔
relativity hates this one simple trick
Yup. If you think of it like a pipe for water, transfer speed is the diameter of the pipe, ping is the length of the pipe.
More direct routes have decreased ping a bit, as well as more servers spread throughout the world, but the distance hasn't changed wildly.
The pipes have gotten way bigger over the years though.
This is somewhat captured by "more direct pathways," but another reason latency has decreased in general for the services/media you're consuming is locality.
A not-insignificant amount of Internet content is replicated into caches across many geolocations. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) go through a whole process to ensure the content being served to you is coming from a replica that is physically closer to you than the original source where the data was first uploaded into the CDN.
In other words, if you uploaded a video to a YouTube server in California, and people from New York or London start to watch it, they are likely going to be downloading a copy of the video from a server near New York or the UK. They are not going to the California server.
But even if they are going to the California server, because you clicked on my strange uncle's sock-sorting channel which isn't exactly worth replicating to CDN's, there are so many more subsea cables and terrestrial fibre paths compared to 10 years ago it's crazy. In the past, it was likely that things would slow down because of congestion on these backbone networks. Nowadays almost all end user data can be transmitted without congestion or contention anywhere in the world, limited more likely by local ISP conditions rather than long-distance capacity, which is really quite amazing.
More direct pathways, more efficient code, lower resistance materials, but at the end of the day the speed of light is a fixed thing. We will never have lower ping than energy can flow through a given material.
It’s like a garden hose and a fire hose. Much more water comes out of a fire hose than a garden hose or a tap and they are connected to the same water supply.
Yep Aussie that used to play with friends in Singapore. I'd get 170ms, almost as bad as the states. Since we now have direct cable links to Singapore latency has reduced down to 60-70ms, a massive difference.
Also, the latency of a ping isn't the same thing as the effective latency of a service.
A ping is the best-case latency. A service (like a web server or game server) has to accept that packet, decode the packet, do any calculations relevant or maybe wait for more packets, etc.
That side of "latency" has absolutely gotten better. HTTP, in particular. HTTP is based on TCP/IP, which responds to errors by slowing down and starting over (grossly over-simplified). Thanks to Content Distribution Networks and the overall quality improvements of last-mile networks, the rate of lost packets is way, way lower than it used to be. Because of CDNs, the content is close to you, giving less opportunity for a dropped packet anywhere in the line.
The back bone of the internet has been fibre optics for a long, long time, and the bulk of the time that a ping spends crossing from one point to another is going to be the speed of light, which doesn't get any faster, even when the raw amount of data gets larger and larger
Ping has gotten way better. I used to be psyched to get 200ms, and now I can get <10ms.
That too, although depending on where you live that change happened a while ago.
So did “several kb/s”
Good point
Some of these people don't understand what it was like to play Unreal, Tribes, Duke Nukem, Warcraft, Everquest, etc, on 200+ ping (if you're lucky).
Going from 28k to 56k to DSL to Cable....
Kids these days that make these posts just don't understand.
I remember a recent Karl Jobst video mentioned a pro gamer who won online events solely because he was a rich family baby and had broadband while everyone else used modems.
He was humbled in LAN events and tapered off completely as more people started getting a decent connection.
A truck and a car drive at the same speed but a truck carries a lot more stuff.
How is it that trucks can carry so much more then cars yet still travel at the same speed?
Ping = speed of light. (Or electricity) Size of truck = being able to read the signal with higher precision.
Good analogy
Technically it’s 0.7c which is infinitely slower than the speed of light and we’re probably never gapping that.
The pipe has gotten much bigger (bandwidth) but the length (ping) of the pipe has remained essentially the same. You can't move two places closer together.
There are ways to cut down pings such as building more CDN or more servers closer to the user. But let's take an example where two people on opposite sides of the world are video calling each other or playing a multiplayer game together, at best the data can only travel at light speed between the two of them.
This. (Should be higher up). Though pings have improved too. On 56k modems we had pings of some 250ms. In bad cases also 1 second (which was borderline okay, for Age of empires, less so for shooters). These days a good ping is probably 10ms. (Factor 100 improvement?)
But sure, the order of magnitude is not comparable to 4kb vs 4gb per second. (Factor 1 million)
Let's say you have a pipe. You want to move water through the pipe. Latency is how long it tales a drop to get from one end of the pipe to the other. Bandwidth is how many drops can move at a time. It is easy to increase the number of drops, you just install a wider pipe. To make the water go faster, you need to either make the pipe slope down, by moving all the dirt under it, (major infrastructure changes), or by using a more powerful pump (major technology shift). Much easier to put in a wider pipe.
Edit: to clarify, you could get a lower ping with a direct fiber connection, or even better, a line of sight microwave link, but those are major shifts in infrastructure/tech, and not necessarily practical.
There was a congressman who infamously got roasted for using the pipe analogy even though from an understanding the infrastructure standpoint it is quite apt.
I mean the full quote in context is him complaining his email showed up late because the internet got backed up.
That's kind of a ridiculous misunderstanding on what must have been user issues.
His delivery of the statement also had intrinsic comic value.
Well, its not a dumptruck. Yeah, I remember colleagues making fun of him, then told them to eli5. They shut up.
The problem with his tirade wasn't really the "series of tubes" analogy. He went on to say that the tubes were getting clogged by downloading movies or a whole book . He was parroting an eli5 without actually understanding how it worked. And when lawmakers are completely unaware of how technology works, they have a tendency to make really bad laws about it.
But again he wasn't completely wrong, because with the way networks are structured particularly at the subdivision level peak time bandwidth congestion is in fact a problem, its becoming less as speed and bandwidth has advanced to the point where its outstripping typical users demand but the qoute was from like 15 years ago at this point.
Yes his particular issue with the email wasn't likely due to any of this, but broadly speaking for a 70ish year old congress critter it was a reasonable enough understanding to ask at least some of the right queations.
To add to this pipe metaphor, if a pipe is made to go through a very long distance, with a lot of loops and bends, you will naturally need some time for the water to reach you from the source to the tap. But once the water reach you, the amount will be determined by the width of the pipe as said.
Think of it like this: we used to have small cars traveling down the road at 60mph. They didn't carry much. Now, we have semis also going 60mph. The semi takes the same time to go from A.to B, but carries a lot more with it.
Ping measures round trip time &- how long a signal takes to propagate from one point to another and back. That's based mostly on physics. It always takes light the same time to go from point A to point B. In contrast, bandwidth tells you how much data you can transmit in a certain period of time. In my analogy, Ping time is determined by the speed limit, bandwidth is determined by the size of the vehicle.
Though notably the slowdown are less typically the main fiber backbone, but the switches your data gets routed through along the way. In most scenarios the most ping that can be saved is in the last mile to your house as that infrastructure is in many areas still copper.
Installation of more direct routes that allow for switch elimination are also areas for big savings because your going through fewer switches and spending more of your travel time on fiber.
Shit Is truly miraculous considering you can at home download a 4k movie in 15 minutes or less and not only can you do that, but so can 10's of thousands of others at the same time.
because kb/s vs mb/s is how much you can get something there. think Morse code. How many letters per second are you sending with Morse code? You can always send shorter dashes and leave less space between them.
But latency is pure speed of light (and a little switching delay, but mostly speed of light) it will ALWAYS be a 100ms ping time (Or more due to switching lag) to Australia from the US NO MATTER WHAT because that is how long LIGHT takes to get there. In morse code think speed of sound. no matter what you do, its fixed.
Ping measures latency, not data throughput.
What a ping shows is how much time it takes to deliver a single data packet to some computer plus the time took by getting the acknowledgement of that back again, meaning it is a round-trip time measurement. But that does not say anything about how many bits the connection can send each second, which is what matters when downloading.
All data packets sent over the same connection will take on average the same time to reach the destination, but how big those packets can be is determined by the maximum bandwidth the connection has. If the bandwidth is high, it will take just a couple of big packets to send all the required data, while a smaller bandwidth will use more.
Picture it like this: imagine the connection between two computers as a conveyor belt, like the ones at the airport luggage halls. The ping says how fast the belt is moving, while the bandwidth how wide the belt is. You may have a fast belt, but if is small, it will mean anything you want to send will need tons of tiny boxes to fit, while a big belt can handle all of that in a handful of small boxes, or even a single one if the belt is big enough and the package is small enough.
the pipes that they send internet through have gotten wider, not shorter
There are fiber optic cables running all across the seafloor across all the continents.
Unless you shift all the continents closer together, there's nothing you're going to be able to do about decreasing the distance of the cables.
Speed of light is the speed of light. Ping is ultimately limited by the speed of light in glass (fibre optic), which is about 2/3rds of its speed in a vacuum.
Ping has come down though: earlier connection technologies such as dialup and xDSL had unavoidable first hop latency (ie. delay between you and the telephone exchange at the other end of your line) due to the need to modulate/demodulate, encode and compress the signals. PPPoE also has some overhead. Typically you’d have 20-30 ms of unavoidable first hop latency even on the fastest connections. With newer technologies like fibre where the signal stays digital the whole way, that’s largely been eliminated. First hop latency on fibre is negligible (like, 1-2 ms).
Once you’re on the internet proper though, it’s always been fibre. The trans-Pacific hop between Australia and the US was ~170 ms in the 1990s and is still that today. The cables run pretty directly across the ocean and the speed of light hasn’t changed, so it’s not going to get any better.
Cause we haven't figured out how to increase the speed of light yet.
If I rent a car, I can get myself from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about 6 hours.
If I want to take all of my friends, I can rent a bus to take all of us there in the same time. Makes sense, more seats, more people.
But I can't rent 6 cars if I'm in a hurry to get myself there in 1 hour. That's just not how it works.
Same with ping vs. bandwidth - it's a lot easier to build out more "seats" or "lanes" or whatever you want to call it so that we can send more bytes around, but at the end of the day they can only go so fast and that's what determines ping.
Add more lanes to a highway.
You can send more cars per hour down the road. But the individual cars go no faster. (The limit is still 70.)
If data were cars, ping would be the time it takes one car to get from A to B, while throughput (what you're calling "download speed") measures how many cars you can get from A to B per second. We figured out how to send more cars through at the same time, but fundamentally, the individual cars haven't gotten any faster.
A few more points.
Fiber optic does have less travel time than copper. We have reduced ping some by switching to fiber. Also data centers have upgraded hardware that can relay data with very slightly less processing time.
But you have to account for your perception of ping. Where have you been measuring ping? If you measure from online games then they have stayed the same because games have a target acceptable ping before they build a match. If you measure ping from Google, it's gone down considerably as Google servers are now everywhere and close by.
We have wider roads that can fit more cars on them, but the speed limit is still more or less the same.
If you wrapped a fibre optic cable around the planet, it would take 450ms for light to travel around it. There is a fundamental limit to how fast information can be moved. Add on all the time delays every time a packet of data is captured, processed, and retransmitted every time it hits a hub, switch, router, etc...
The bandwidth of communications devices has increased, but the speed of light hasn't.
I do have to take one issue with your question. When I started in this industry, transfer speeds were several orders of magnitude less than even kb/s. Our transfer rates were closer to 30 characters per second, which is quite a bit less than even 1kb/sec (1024 characters). However soon after that the rates skyrocketed to 120 cps, and a few years later 240 cps.
Then came the FAST modems... 9600 baud (960cps), 14,400baud (1400cps) etc.
Even with those very slow rates, one could count on cross country latency of about 30ms, which considereing the cps difference's between than and now, isn't that much greater than we can get now.
Say you have a highway with a set speed limit of 60 mph. You can't adjust the speed limit, that was set by the universe itself. If you want to get more cars through in the same time you can add lanes, even dozens or hundreds of lanes and sure enough many more cars can travel through the highway at a time.
But each car still only drives 60mph and takes the same time to get there.
Imagine you had a single lane highway from point A to B, and the trip takes an hour.
Now because of popularity, we have increased the lanes from 1 to 8. The trip will still take an hour, but now way more cars can arrive at the destination at the same time.
The amount of data moving across the wire, what we call download speed, comes from bandwidth. That comes from the "width" of the channel being used to send data. Latency is the speed at which a packet, a small unit of data, can be sent over the distance of the connection. In comparison to download speed, which measures width of the channel, latency measures "depth." They will both be affected by traffic along the route; but latency is measuring raw speed of a packet from end to end where download speed is measuring the ability to send many packets at once. Wider roads means more traffic can pass at once.
Ping is a measure of the travel time of the signal from point A to point B.
This is limited by factors like the speed of light, distance, and the processing speed of the devices like routers along the path.
Ping times have actually considerably improved since the 80s and 90s, and but you can't make the signal go faster than the laws of nature will allow.
Its kind of like asking "how come even though I replaced my motorcycle (1-2 seat) with a family van (6-8 seats) it still takes me 30 minutes to get to work?"
Ping is just the time in milliseconds between you and your destination, increase the distance, or perhaps more impactful in networks, increase the number of intersections (devices, routers/switches) and the ms will go up.
It hasn't stayed the same, if we're talking about the home user experience. When I gamed in the 90s playing Mech Warrior 2 and Quake 2, anything under 300 ms was considered fantastic, now gamers complain if their ping hits 30 ms. So it has changed.
Ping times have come down…. But most people use Wi-Fi instead of wired connections now, and Wi-Fi has horrid latency… and the speed of light isn’t getting any faster. Further, a lot of latency is in that last mile connection where the underlying infrastructure is often lacking.
The trucks on the information super highway have gotten bigger, but the speed limit hasn't changed.
In a sense, there is practically no limit for download speeds.
If there is one cable connecting my house to your house, then we can transmit information however fast that cable allows.
And if we double the cables, well, we can download twice as fast, by sending data along both cables.
We can keep doubling as much as we feel inclined to pay for more cables to be installed.
(This is not realistically how we increase download speeds, since we usually are upgrading the tech instead, but as a thought experiemnt this is worth keeping in mind.)
---
However, no matter how much we upgrade the cables, ping is hard-capped by:
Suppose that my house is at the north pole, and your's is at the south pole. Optimistically, I think that's ~0.066 light-seconds away from me, so ~66miliseconds for light to travel from my home to yours, so our ping will be at least double-that at ~130ms (and probably a bit more, because our computers take some time to react to receiving a message).
Doubling the cables connecting our houses doesn't change the ping, because it still the same amount of time for a round-trip between our homes. I'd send a request for a download, and wait 130ms for data to reach me through the cables. If we have double the cables, I get double the data download per second, but I can't start the download any faster.
(Like that joke about how if 1 woman takes 9 months to deliver a baby, how long would it take 3 women to deliver a baby? Still about 9 months, even if these women could deliver 3-times as many babies.)
If you drop a ball from somewhere high up it falls however fast it will fall because physics. If you drop a lot of balls then you end up with more of them, but it still takes them the same amount of time to fall.
A larger bucket can carry more water, but it takes just as long to walk to the well and back.
It's the same as asking "how come there's more cars driving from San Diego to LA, but it still takes the same amount of time to drive from SD to LA".
Among other things, half the circumference of the Earth is around 10,000 kilometers, or 0.07 light-seconds. So if you're sending a ping to the exact opposite side of the planet, nothing in the universe can get your ping time lower than 70ms.
Well, running a fiberoptic line through the Earth's core could get it there a little faster. But there are several problems with that.
I mean, they really haven't stayed the same. I remember back when ADSL was the dominant connection tech and pings of under 100ms were considered 'good' while now with fiber and such you can get sub 10 ms.
Ping is the measure of how long it takes for the data to go from your computer to the other computer.
When we had copper wires, data could travel at about 2/3 of the speed of light because of various factors in the wire. Now with fiber optic, it’s way closer to the full speed of light.
But because nothing can travel faster than light, we can’t really improve the speed anymore.
What big companies do to try and reduce ping is to have new computers with the data you want physically closer to you, so there is less travel.
This is why if you play video games for instance you will chose to be in US or EU or Asia server (depending which is closer to you) in order to have better ping : to reduce the physical distance data has to travel.
Imagine a pipe. Now let water run through this pipe.
It will take a certain amount of time for the water to come out at the end. That's latency/ping.
Now let the water run for let's say 10 seconds into a bucket. The amount of water in the bucket divided by 10 seconds is bandwidth.
Now let sirup run through the pipe. It will take longer to come out, but the bucket will be filled more or less in same time. The latency increases, bandwidth stays the same.
Water/sirup are different transport media, like copper or fiber optics.
Now make the pipe wider. Time taken for stuff to come out remains the same, but the bucket will fill faster. Bandwidth increases. You get more stuff within same amount of time, thus "faster".
Over time, your plumber (ISP) decides to upgrade your infrastructure and installs shorter pipes or uses water instead of sirup. Latency decreases.
Yes, the pipe analogy is not optimal, but hey, this is ELI5.
There's a minimum ping based on distance to what you're connected to which is a significant fraction of the speed of light. Add to that the processing time to cross various routers and such along the way, and then processing time at the server itself and it adds up.
However, gaming today has people getting annoyed when their ping is over 40-50, but when I was gaming heavily 20 years ago, you were happy to get a ping at 95-110. People with sub-100 pings were envied. People with a sub-40 ping you could be sure were actually hosting the server and on the same local network.
Latency (ping) has improved, but it has a physical limit. The amount of data transmitted does not. You're thinking about it as a single line that moves data bits faster to get more data in a certain time, but that's not what it is. What is actually happening is you're expanding the width of the line so more crosses over (that's why it is called bandwidth).
Think of it like a hose - a skinny hose will have a small stream of water coming out of it, because the hose is small. But hook a firehose to the same source (assuming it can maintain the pressure - pressure in this analogy equals the near-speed-of-light mentioned earlier), and a lot more water comes out. That's what bandwidth is - it isn't data moving physically faster, it is more data moving at the same time.
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