To me, the 5ms ping is the most impressive part. I might not use 100Mbps on a daily basis, but the low latency is nice all the time.
Edited for clarity.
Edited for clarity.
(20 000 km) / the speed of light = 66.712819 milliseconds
12,756.2 km / c = 42.5501031 ms
It's worth pointing out that we're looking at more like 0.65c, through optical fibre. This would also be ignoring routing infrastructure/processing time and network prioritisation.
Which residential fiber products have huge latency?
--- google.com ping statistics --- 26 packets transmitted, 26 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 9.077/15.996/34.578/7.464 ms
Interleaving doesn't add huge amounts of latency. To the LNS with the ISP I'm on, I usually see about 11-16ms to the first hop, maybe 5ms to a game server on their network a most. Without interleaving, I see about 5-7ms less on a good day.
Now, saying that, there are different levels of interleaving that can be applied on modern DSLAMs, but we're not really talking tens of milliseconds here.
It's also worth keeping in mind that your pings won't be truly representative of latency. Plenty of ISPs de-prioritise ICMP traffic.
My isp (Qwest) uses interleaving and it adds quite a bit to my first hop (it usually is about 60ms) and from what I've seen those people actually living in a more populated area the interleaving latency added is about the same (>30ms first hop and usually closer to 60). So of course it depends on the ISP and qwest is notoriously bad for this but is my only option, and occurs with plenty of other ISPs with interleaving.
Physical coast to coast distance is 15 light-milliseconds.
When you start to factor in things like the fact that light travels 1/3 as fast in a glass fiber as it does in vacuum, routing overhead, and the fact that ping is a round-trip measurement, 60-100ms is about normal.
For instance, if you're using WLAN you might end up doubling your response time. Something to keep in mind if you're a latency freak like me!