intercontinental networking for a single gameserver

Question

I've got a gameserver based in US/Los Angeles, and I've got people from Europe asking for a EU gameserver for better network latency.

I've been thinking about tunneling traffic from an EU machine in Frankfurt Germany to my machine in LA/US. Would there be a significant improvement in latency by having my users connect through a tunnel from EU to the gameserver in LA?

If the answer is no, is there any way I can create a sort of "gateway" from other countries to a centralized server to improve latency?

Also to consider: If someone connects from the U.K. to Frankfurt, then to LA through the tunnel, would this negatively impact the connection?

The network both US and EU machines would be on is the InterNAP network, if it matters, dedicated bandwidth.

Answer 1

Tunneling won't help you, those packets still need to travel from Europe to the US and back. The longer the distance, the higher latency gets (roughly +1ms for every 100km), so routing traffic from the UK to Frankfurt to LA would even make it worse.

If you want to reduce latency, place those servers closer to your customers, host clusters in several continents and let your customers connect to the server closest to them.