International Play and Ping

[Bones]

This topic was brought up during one of the many battles on Donner. After some encouragement I decided to start this one.

Though I am a software / electrical engineer, I am not an IT specialist. I was wondering if a repeater station or other dedicated server could be setup for the maps at different locations so that people at different parts of the world would log into and get a more direct route to the gaming server to reduce the long distance pings and improve or allow for international play? I know it costs money, but I am trying to start the ball rolling for ideas.

 

[Bones]

Even if the repeater or dedicated remote servers might be able to reduce the number of hops or necessary connections, is there anything we can do on our side to establish a more direct route for distant servers to reach us. Brainstorming ideas include

map location?
asking for help from the people who privide us the connection at our game server?

Is there another way to reduce the ping bottleneck so that maybe we can improve international play. Of course if this gets solved then we will probably have to increase the number of map servers due to the increase in players. This may be a bigger problem. If my ideas are not realistic, can you provide us with other ideas?