I think the reason you don't see them geographically mapped is because the protocols used for a pool aren't very latency dependent at all. As other pool operators have discovered, there is an inefficient way the protocol handles it's number of connections. This is being hacked and patched by people who are helping with bitcoind and pushpoold projects on github. I have seen some pool operators use old theories for web content delivery that haven't helped their growth as much as they are just adding more operating systems. The old theory is that you spread your load geographically so that people get content faster from a server closer to them. With bitcoind and pushpoold, the bottleneck seems to be in the number of open connections the networking stack can handle in the operating system. More OSes = more connection capacity. Eleuthria seems to have figured this out the best and is planning on one host with 10 or more VM's on it. Hope I didn't give my private pool growth secrets away! jk I like helping the community.
Thanks, thats interesting.
So there would be no benefit connecting to a pool 'based' in Sweden (for example) via a VPN server located in the same country, from the other side of the globe?
Not sure if this is sarcastic?
You should see the cacti charts for the network card on my pool server. It's silly. I'm not running some 2TH/s operation, yet, but still...
To answer your question more directly. If you host your pool from a DC that has halfway respectable backbones fed in, you should be able to get data from the other side of the globe at just a bit later than the speed of light. There's plenty of fiber in those oceans to do whatever you want with data. That's speaking strictly latency wise. As far as bandwidth? This isn't a torrent. The amount of data sent and received by one miner is tiny. Wireshark it and look at some data with rrdtool/cacti. If you think a VPN will help you, go for it. Just don't spend too much!