CGNAT should be illegal.
Or at least it should be illegal to advertise a CGNAT service as an "Internet connection". It's not an Internet connection, you can't use it to send or receive arbitrary IP packets, only TCP/UDP.
Or at least it should be illegal to advertise a CGNAT service as an "Internet connection". It's not an Internet connection, you can't use it to send or receive arbitrary IP packets, only TCP/UDP.
Honestly, I'm genuinely surprised no ISP has started doing "gamer" marketing as it seems to be so effective elsewhere, "We give you real public IPs so you can connect directly to your opponents for lower latency, get on the internet fast lane!".
(Either way, a "gamer" branded product that is unlikely to actually help in most real gaming scenarios is 95% of "gamer" branded products.)
No idea if they work. I can see conceptually why they might (internet routing is often more of an approximation of a best route than the actual best route), but the problems seem too individualized for a generic VPN to help. Happy to be wrong if someone knows how well/why they work.
Does this actually work? VON is always an extra hop
Hops also aren't a particularly useful abstraction here. They don't align with latency very well; the only thing a hop implies is that a router has to get the packet and route it, but that's a huge variance in latency. A hop could take nanoseconds or it could take hundreds of milliseconds. The number of hops doesn't really imply anything useful about latency.
All that is to say that yes, I believe under some circumstances the VPN could give you lower latency (with a bunch of asterisks). One asterisk is that figuring out whether your peering is good or bad practically requires a network engineer to look at your routes, it's not an easy thing to figure out. A second is that those routes change frequently, so just because the VPN helps today does not mean that it will tomorrow or even for the next hour. A third is that these solutions are likely somewhat custom; each ISP or maybe even each network segment will have particular links that need to be avoided, which means each ISP/network segment will have particular IP ranges that "encourage" the correct routing. Figuring out which to use would be non-trivial.
In TLDR form, I think a network engineer willing to spend like 4 hours analyzing their network to set up a VPN that will shave 5-10ms off their latency to a particular game for a limited amount of time could probably do so. It's within the realm of possibility that some company is doing a Thousand Eyes-like thing and actually creating optimized VPNs with the same strategy. My suspicion, however, is that they just tell you to log in and try your latency on a bunch of servers til you find one that's lower (at the present moment) and then they hope you never check again.