Vancouver ranked the top North American city with the lowest network latency, says report

According to the popular network benchmark site SpeedTest, Vancouver is the only North American city to make the company’s list of top 11 gaming cities.

Compared to top-dogs like Bucharest, Romania and Chengdu, China, the sprawling British Columbian metropolis came in at no.9 on the list. It achieved an average latency of 12 milliseconds(ms/ping) along with 117.55 Megabits-per-second(Mbps) bandwidth in download and 50.23 Mbps in upload.

Moving across the southern border, places like Seattle(no.15) didn’t even make it to the top 11. By comparison, Los Angeles trailed behind at no.20. Tokyo, Japan, on the other hand, sits at no.35, a surprisingly low rank behind Santiago, Chile(no.34) and Sydney, Australia(no.33).

However, while SpeedTest categorized contenders based on their average network latency and speed to the benchmark site’s affiliated servers, the numbers do not necessarily reflect real online gaming performance.

Take Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege(R6S) as an example. Even though the growing tactical first-person shooter amassed 35 million players in 2018, Ubisoft only hosts R6S servers in the United States that serve the entire North American continent.

For most R6S players in Canada, they will encounter more lag because their data has to travel the extra distance between the servers and their clients. In a shooting game that has no respawn mechanism and puts emphasis on lighting fast actions, network delay could mean the difference between life and death.

Still, Canada makes up for it by having many renowned game studios, such as The Coalition (Gears of War 4 and 5), Ubisoft Montreal (Rainbow Six Siege, Rainbow Six Quarantine, Far Cry 5), Ubisoft Toronto (Watch Dogs: Legion, Far Cry 5) and more.

Source: SpeedTest