yippe for hours of googling. I've finally come to a solution. I have Qwest DSL and I was experiencing very high latency. 50ms + just getting to google which its peering point is just a stones throw away from here.
After beating down the doors at Qwest I found out they by default turn on "interleaving" (an error correction typically used for crappy connections). after escalating my ticket from tier 1 support, to management, tier 2 support and FINALLY Engineering, "fastport" was turned on or in other words interleaving was removed from my line. this slick little feature cut my latency down to 21ms to the same ip address...
just a heads up for any of you out there with DSL (ADSL to be more specific). On average interleaving adds 20-30 ms delay for its error correction. hope this helps anybody battling latency mysteries.
