Originally Posted by BoggyB

I am amused at the number of people who think that having a list server next door will let them connect to more *game* servers.

Just to clarify things: there are two sorts of servers used when playing JJ2 online. One sort are list servers. Think of a list server as a sort of telephone enquiries system. It has a list of all game servers, along with where the game servers are. You contact the list server, and ask it for a list of games. It then gives you a snapshot of it's list. It doesn't matter if this takes a while. A few hundred milliseconds is fine, even a whole second or two. All it's doing is giving you a list. With the number of JJ2 players, an old 486 on a 28.8k modem would probably be enough (no offence to Nimrod and his plans for world-wide list-server domination).

The other sort of server is the game server. This is the actual server you connect to when you're playing an online game of JJ2. Now, this server has to do a lot of things, like deal with everyone moving around in the level and tell other players where everyone is, who's taking pot-shots at who, and what's up with the blue flag that just got nicked. This server has to both a) send a lot more data, and b) send it in real-time (a delay of ~100ms gets annoying, and more than ~300ms is often unplayable). Think of it as a conference call with other people: if you're too far behind, then you won't be able to keep track of what's going on.

To get a list of servers, all you need is a list server somewhere you can access. To play online without too much lag, what you need is a game server somewhere relatively nearby (note that 'nearby' can be a few countries away, if the intermediate connection is good enough

Oh, and server bandwidth does *not* depend on the distance of the host. Bandwidth is how much data you can send per second, not how long it takes to get there. Think of your connection as a pipe: the bigger the pipe, the larger the bandwidth. A longer pipe means stuff takes more time to get from one end to the other.