wispguy
| route through dallas.....why....
Most companies use peering points in major cities with something called BGP to decide the best route. I believe all of Colorado's Comcast traffic goes out to the California peering point (though this may have changed at some point). From this peering point it chooses the best path to the address you have requested and chances are the other provider that you are requesting is peering in California (or Dallas) as well and even though your connection is in the same state they will peer in another state. If Comcast were to peer in Colorado with companies such as L3, Cogent co, Qwest, Sprint, ATT and the various others out there you would be seeing sub 20ms to most of Colorado. The reason they don't peer everywhere is because of cost and priority. Once the data chooses a path off of their network they really don't care what the latencies are as long as it keeps them from getting phone calls about it. If you stay on a providers network you will typically never see over 10-50ms from coast to coast. Once you get off a providers network and connect to another at a major peer point those can go up into the 100's for latency. The major jump in latency depends on how big the pipe is, how long it is, what type of equipment it is, maintenance, and load. If you are gaming and want the lowest latency you can get select game servers on your providers network and if the server is working properly you should never see over 40ms to it. |
