Re:Speed of light????

Electricity and vacuum? Hello?

I take it you didn't pay too much attention when someone, say, at school, talked about these things, right...? It is *light* that travels at the speed of light in a vacuum and slower elsewhere (which doesn't matter much as most of the universe actually *is* a vacuum) - electricity, on the other hand, travels in conductive materials, which, for the most part, are rather dense... Metal, for example...

Now, funnily enough, it has been discovered, that electricity can be made to travel faster if the wire it runs on is frozen... which makes the Arctic a rather fitting place.

But to get to the actual point: Surely, data centres built in the Arctic would be using data links based on fibre optics, not electricity? Thus getting us back to (almost) speed of light - the (almost) being due to fibre optic cables not being vacuums...

To the original poster regarding ping-speed: I dare suggest that ping speeds from the Arctic would suffer no more than, say, ping speeds anywhere else across the globe. The Arctic, as it happens, is a lot closer to e.g. the UK than is any place in California. We still manage to connect to servers in California just fine, though. A few ms slower than servers in London, true, but what can you expect...?

I would concur with those who suggested that availability of administrators (swapping out dead servers only every few weeks still requires someone around in general...) and the like is an issue. And electricity is not going to be cheap in the Arctic area, either - for lack of it, mostly.