Is it even possible? Everything I check seems to be above 300ms. I want to run a voip server and need to have a server with good latency. Thanks!

I just trued a test and got 477 ms to the west coast and 422 to the east coast, this is with Cat CDMA from Chiang Mai. I can't get ADSL here as I am too far away from any phone exchange. If you can get a good quality adsl connection you should be able to do better.

I have 3BB connection and not too far from the city at all. 10 min walk to the moat.

Doubt if you will get under 300 ms. I pinged 1and1.com, which is a well known hosting server with several sites in southern California. Got a few pings below 330 but also several over 400. Seems that 340-350 ms is about average for them. Note that I am on TOT in Phuket so probably slower ping because have several hops to get to BKK to jump to international, so would reckon a BKK location just a little bit faster.

I have a couple of VPS in the US with Futurehosting.biz - I get an average of 290 ms from my home internet connection, which is a fairly good one.

They have data centres in various locations, you can see the pings from each location to various cities here, will give you a ballpark idea, though obviously you can expect a bit worse in Thailand.

You will not get much better, nothing to do with the hosting, but with the physical distance to the US.

Due to the distance if I remember correctly, the time it takes for electrons (data) to go there and come back at the speed of light is about 150 msec.

Obviously, also due to the distance and the different undersea cable providers etc, there will be several hops (your ISP, proxy/censoring servers, routers along the way...)each adding a small delay.

Lots of the delays are caused by the local ISP's, a ping from Pattaya to Bangkok (google's Thai servers) is already 60-80 msec, which is almost all equipment latency as the distance should only account for a few msec...

Practically, best technically case scenario attainable to the US will get you around 250 msec ping times.

Well the number of hops is def a great issue here. Currently there are 28 hops to reach my current VPS, which is in Montreal. However it is hitting Los Angeles (Level3) at hop 14 already. So I found a few hostings offering VPS in LA data centers, and traced their IPs, and it was again in 25+ hop range and using a different route profile. The biggest slow down seems to be due to one of the hops hitting Australia for some reason.

Well the number of hops is def a great issue here. Currently there are 28 hops to reach my current VPS, which is in Montreal. However it is hitting Los Angeles (Level3) at hop 14 already. So I found a few hostings offering VPS in LA data centers, and traced their IPs, and it was again in 25+ hop range and using a different route profile. The biggest slow down seems to be due to one of the hops hitting Australia for some reason.

Yup, that's another issue.

All ISP's, along with their bandwidth providers, use dynamic routing, so how your traffic moves around the world and how many hops depends on the time of the day, network load etc...

Big hosting companies/data centers also do incoming load balancing (between their bandwidth pipes), often on a round robin base done at the dns level. So for a few days you might get good latency, next few days worse (depends on the TTL set in the SOA at the dns server, meaning how long the IP address associated with a domain name stays cached in all the DNS cache servers)...

Would you recommend setting up a server in Europe then that dials out to North America? Do any ISPs route thru Europe?

Would you recommend setting up a server in Europe then that dials out to North America? Do any ISPs route thru Europe?

Doesn't make any difference!

If you take a globe you'll see that the US is almost exactly on the other side of Bangkok on this globe(actually Lima in Peru, South America) so which side of the world you try to reach it through is not going to make much difference.

On top of it, since the majority (or a big part anyway) of the WWW is hosted in the US, most main pipes are going to there directly.

Which results in the effect that a lot of traffic to Europe is routed over the US anyway, making this traffic go round 1.5 times the circomference of the globe!!!

I used to get pings to Europe of 500 msec, while the US only was 300 msec, eventhough physically Europe is just a tad over halfway to the US...

It's better now since the Thai ISP's can buy their bandwidth freely (befor they were tied into the government CAT monopoly), so now traffic to Europe is often routed more directly...

If your main traffic, data or voice, is to the US, you'll have to learn to live with the fact that they are the furthest away from Thailand you can find! Along with obviously being exactly 12 hours behind (New York anyway)...

Not sure what exactly you want to do with your own voip gateway, I assume easy and cheap/free connections to US numbers?

Would you recommend setting up a server in Europe then that dials out to North America? Do any ISPs route thru Europe?

Connections from Thailand through to Europe are pretty lousy compared to what is available through to the US. Stick with the US or think about Singapore. And for reasons I don't understand, I usually get far better connection speeds through to US sites using Australian based proxies than I can get leaving it to chance.

I assume all calls these days go over the internet anyways. So how does True International plan (via cellphone) get pretty good service? I call Canada and it's just a very short delay.