As a personal warcraft addictplayer, I can report that my average ping time to the couple of servers that I play on is around 25ms, reported in-game.
I've not played AoC at all so I can't comment on that, unfortunately.
I would recommend that any serious gamer runs the TcpAckFrequency fix as detailed here:
NOTE if you are running Windows Vista this setting may not have any effect - a hotfix is needed which i'm tracking down. This works fine under Windows XP
Type "regedit" in windows "run.." dialog to bring up registry menu
Then find:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\
There will be multiple NIC interfaces listed in there, find the one you use to connect to the internet, there will be several interfaces listed (they have long names like {7DBA6DCA-FFE8-4002-A28F-4D2B57AE8383}. Click each one, the right one will have lots of settings in it and you will see your machines IP address listed there somewhere. Right-click in the right hand pane and add a new DWORD value, name it TcpAckFrequency, then right click the entry and click Modify and assign a value of 1.
You can change it back to 2 (default) at a later stage if it affects your other TCP application performance. it tells windows how many TCP packets to wait before sending ACK. if the value is 1, windows will send ACK every time it receives a TCP package.
B.
p.s. - I am on the BBYW Pro package, with Interleaving off on a 8128k synced line. YMMV.
