This is a continuation of a 1.5 year old thread so it wouldn't let me reply to the original:

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/633066-large-geographical-area-network/

But, for anyone interested, thought I'd give an update on this. My current project is to try to implement some of the concepts described in that thread.

The motivation for this was I play League of Legends a lot, and starting about 1 year ago, ping and packet loss increased substantially even though my provider was the same. This was due to a standoff between Cogent and Comcast, two major internet backbone providers that resulted in frequently congested routes for those on the East Coast.

I will say things have got much, much better the last 2 weeks as Riot (and possibly Cogent+Comcast) has made network improvements. Even so, lag is still a huge problem for some players, and a minor/occasional nuisance for many players.

My current project is a high-speed gaming network that's goal is to mitigate a lot of the network congestion. It will do this by several methods: 1) by proxying through server(s) on premium networks, it can optimize the network path in many cases 2) There are techniques to optimize the network performance further in terms of connectivity to/from the proxy servers that can reduce packet loss and jitter of the overall network connection.

In terms of development, I have a very early version that works for UDP-only and just 1 proxy server on a simple UDP echo program. I need to test that with an actual UDP only-game. Next I'll work on implementing the TCP-tunnelling side, as most games use a combination of UDP + TCP, where the lobby/match-making/authentication uses TCP and the actual gameplay is UDP. The IP's have to match, so you have to tunnel/proxy both.