Bicoastal Speeds Are Converging: Sneak Peek At Upcoming Novarum Report

I've touted the benefits of CalSPEED's use of servers on both coasts of the U.S., and so you may be asking, "How's that working out for you?" It's showing an interesting trend: convergence. In the upcoming Novarum report on the Spring 2015 mobile field test results, Ken Biba shows how speeds to west and east coasts are converging. In the graph above, we see the difference in speeds for any location where user tests to both the west coast server and east coast server. For Sprint, the east coast speed is 10% slower, and for Verizon, it is about 20% slower.

From the Novarum report:
"In the best possible time, the physics of data transmissions adds about 80 milliseconds of additional latency to get from one coast to the other, in addition to any local wireless access latency. In the case where the  latency difference between servers on opposite coasts is zero, we speculate that traffic for both servers is peered through a geographically central location, such as Kansas. The latency difference between East and West servers has decreased over time - converging on 80 milliseconds."