It certainly affects failure interpretation. A Web application might interpret failure on a connection timeout of 10 seconds for a server, the assumption being that if the server has not responded by this time it has probably crashed. In the table, we present our experimental results concerning latency. We measured latency in milliseconds, and show both mean and median latency. A large discrepancy between mean and median suggests that the server suffered from the latency anomaly.
Geographical distance is approximate, rounded up to the nearest thousand kilometres.
Note that geographical distance is necessary a direct path across the globe. Australia, Brazil, and Japan are routed via the USA, and Lithuania is routed via Sweden. Although IP packets are routed dynamically, we observed that in general the same route is followed for groups of packets sent in a short time scale. For several of our experiments we checked the route before and after, and did not find any major discrepancies that might significantly compromise our calculation of geographical distance or hop count. We use this to calculate the minimum possible latency for connections between the UK and the target host.