chess.com connection speed favors U.S based players

Different network adapters? Different signal paths?

Your laptop would communicate directly to the router in your own house... by wireless? By ethernet cable? Only a few meters away, anyway. Then directly into the internet.

Your phone would communicate with... what? Send the signal up to a satellite, across to another satellite, then down to your phone company before being handed off to an ISP (Internet Service Provider). Tens of thousands of kilometers, before it even enters the internet?

Yeah, chess.com is incredibly laggy compared to lichess for us.

There seems to be some confusion between network connection speed and network lag. Your connection to your internet provider has next to nothing to do with network lag. Just because you can talk to your ISP at 100Mbs (or whatever) that doesn't mean your ISP is talking to the rest of the world that fast. Your ISP also has no control over how your signals get to chess.com and back. In fact, the way the WWW works is to split your communications into packets, as blueemu said, and send the packets by what it thinks is the fastest path. Routers automatically keep track of which paths are faster at any given moment and adjust traffic direction accordingly. During the time of your connection to chess.com your communications may take several different paths at once. Your PC has to wait for all the packets to arrive before it can act on the information. If any path hits a snag it affects all the packets because your PC waits for the slow ones to arrive.

I apologize if I lost people with any technospeak. I spent too many years living this stuff to know how to explain it properly to a layman.

Or, as mentioned in this topic, any of the connections your traffic takes to the site. If your phone and PC use the same connectivity, then it's probably the phone (or the wifi if your PC is wired).

I definately think hard wired is faster, I noticed a difference when I hard wired

Man i lose on time and they still have like 30sec left , i have good connection , im really fast on high speed dps mouse, i think i should stop playing againt US based player, i wish i can see which server we are connected at , and it will be nice if we can see our ping in ms like most of fps games.

With some exceptions, live games' are being played through the site's primary server/data center in the US. The site is working towards a more distributed setup where players will connect to a server closer to them but that's only hosting a subset of games currently, as I understand it.

There are some things you can do to minimize connection issues and lag.

https://support.chess.com/en/articles/8652402-how-can-i-optimize-my-online-chess-performance

https://support.chess.com/en/articles/8584209-how-do-i-fix-my-disconnect-lag-issues

This is a big reason why I prefer lichess. It's sooooo much faster.

They also allow all lag as far as I know.

Yeah but I'm like a 1 hour train journey away from France so the speed is so fast for me. I have about 7 ping on lichess.

I've just dropped 100 points playing 1|0 bullet, largely due to timeouts and so I started premoving to see what that did. I lost some games due to unexpected opponent moves but I also noticed I lost two seconds after only 4 very fast pre-moves (e4,e5,Nf3,d6,d4,d7,dxe5). How can this be so? Even with a bad network, premoves should be instant assuming they make it to the server in time. This implies some RIDICULOUS latency of >300ms, doesn't it?

Can someone take a look and see if there is a bug where premoves are happening client-side on the phone app?

Premoves take a minimum of 0.1 second and each gets sent to the server one at at time after your opponent's immediately proceeding move. They are not allowed sent to the server in advance.

If you're experiencing high lag, beyond what the site forgives over a series of moves, they can take longer.

It's all a big conspiracy ain't it?

Thanks. This answers a lot for me. 100ms isn't nearly sufficient though from Adelaide where my ISP is based. Adelaide to NYC is 257ms, Adelaide to SFO is 160ms. I guess I'll just have to avoid 1+0.

The site is working on a more distributed server system and eventually all games will be running over that which should improve things for many members.

Lichess doesn't have these issues icl