Does gblx fiber network matter to voip?

[datarax]

I have been pinging the bv proxys and from pa the ping times are:

proxy.dca.broadvoice.com 147.135.0.128 53ms avg 166ms max
proxy.mia.broadvoice.com 147.135.4.128 64ms avg 72ms max
proxy.lax.broadvoice.com 147.135.8.128 89ms avg 116ms max
proxy.chi.broadvoice.com 147.135.12.128 39ms avg 49ms max
proxy.nyc.broadvoice.com 147.135.20.128 18ms avg 36ms max

None of the trace routes indicate they are running over global crossing.

However,

when i ping sip.stanaphone from pa to ca they come in at 21ms avg 37ms max. The GBLX hop appears to go from NY to CA and back in 19ms over fiber. The BV comparable trip not using GBLX takes over 4 times longer. Does this affect call quality/latency?

Let's say I'm in PA and I call PA using the lax proxy. Do all the udp packets have to travel to lax then back to pa over the net where it jumps onto the pstn or does the lax proxy hand off the conversation to the point where it jumps on the pstn making it not important that I have a good ping with lax? If it doesn't hand off the conversation is it for billing purposes so that the provider knows how many minutes I used?

Marble Associates is at 38 edge hill road, Waltham MA 02154. They seem to own those ip's because they come up on my visualroute program as the terminating point for each of them. Does anyone know who Marble Associates is? I can't find them on google. The only thing I could find at 38 edge hill road was an adoption agency. According to my visual route program all these proxies go to the cities indicated then back to waltham MA in about 4 hops. This can't be right can it?

[TheWizard]

Originally Posted by datarax

None of the trace routes indicate they are running over global crossing.

BV has never routed over GBLX to any of their proxies for me either, even before the recent outage. The proxies have always routed through GNAPS or InterNAP (PNAP).

Let's say I'm in PA and I call PA using the lax proxy. Do all the udp packets have to travel to lax then back to pa over the net where it jumps onto the pstn or does the lax proxy hand off the conversation to the point where it jumps on the pstn making it not important that I have a good ping with lax? If it doesn't hand off the conversation is it for billing purposes so that the provider knows how many minutes I used?

Outbound traffic (i.e. your voice in a two-way call) will go from your residence in PA to LAX (if you are using the LAX proxy) then back to PA (if you are calling a landline in PA). Going cross-continent and back (roughly 200ms round-trip) isn't going to show a noticeable lag from VoIP phones to landline phones. That's why many people use proxies across the continent, simply because they may receive more stability and no noticeable loss of quality.

[colincam]

How come when I ping by name they all come back to the same IP? Are you guys actually putting the IP into the Sipura instead of the proxy name?