DC2NET Links

So assuming all other things are equal (a wildly optimistic assumption but stay with me), how much of a difference to web page load time would it be between.

A) connecting to a web page hosted on a server across the street
B) connecting to a web page hosted on a server on the other side of
the world.

I never did physics at school but my understanding is that electrons travel on a wire at the speed of light or thereabouts (300,000 km / sec) and the circumference of the earth at the widest point is 40,000 km so with perfect hardware (you’ll need to imagine that) a request could go to the farthest point of the earth and come back in 1/7th of a second.

So "distance" per se is not relevant, theoretically.

Yet in reality anything travelling across the world wide web has to hop and bounce from one network to another. My understanding is that these "network hops" (I’m sure there is a better word but I dont know it) are what would create the real difference in connection time between scenario A and scenario B above.

Having said that…..

How much of a difference is it really?
Is this geographical sand in the gears really something that can be perceived by the end user?

This article does a terrific job of testing out the effect of pinging a set of 10 different websites from 3 different locations (Germany/India/USA) and testing the outcome.
http://www.webdevhub.net/website-opt…te-performance

From this it’s clear that there is some time difference BUT the difference
in response time from the very fastest to the very longest is only 500 ms (half a second).

My conclusion from this is that when it comes to making a choice of server hosting company the "geographic distance" is a factor so minor as to be irrelevant in the equation.

Of course there are other factors like potential SEO impacts, cost, performance, physical risk etc.
I know about those things and I DON’T WISH TO DISCUSS THOSE IN THIS THREAD.
My question relates SOLELY to the impact of distance on load time performance.

Any comments?