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Seeing the submarine cable maps for Hawaii can be a bit misleading. If I'm not mistaken, a lot of the fibre capacity simply bounces through Hawaii and isn't trivial for the islands to hook into. I don't believe Hawaii itself is any better connected to the internet than say, New Zealand

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You are historically accurate. For a long time there was a lot of fiber that physically hopped through Hawaii, but didn’t actually talk to any gear locally (switches/routers). It was just an optical landing/regen station.

These days I believe there is less “optical only regen” and more IP-connected links.

Thanks for the precision. My point was: your latency will probably be more impacted by the number of nodes from you to the destination server than the distance to this server.

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