What are geographic clusters in internet infrastructure?

Geographic clusters are regions — such as North America, Europe, and Asia — where devices communicate quickly with each other but slowly across regional boundaries. Global internet infrastructure is not uniform: it is shaped by geography, physics, and economics. Fiber optic cables traverse oceans at the speed of light, but the distances still create unavoidable latency — a round-trip packet from New York to London takes roughly 100 ms, while New York to Tokyo requires roughly 200 ms. For a beginner, this matters because any global network, including blockchains, must operate across these clusters, meaning nodes in different regions can never receive information at exactly the same instant.