Hey mate,
I have similar stats to you, but I live in Australia, I get around 180ms ping to the Xbox servers in the US. I get a nice low 25ms from the Date Centre in Sydney.
Halo games run in two different ways.
P2P connection. The game needs to be “hosted” somewhere, and to save money many companies and games use P2P connections, basically where one player in the game becomes the Host, and their system is where the actual game takes place. Everyone else, the Clients, connect to the host’s xbox through the internet. This leads to the host having 0 ping, and other players having various ping to the game depending ,pretty much, on how far away they are from the host (more accurately, how many gateways the connection has to go through to get between the host and the ‘clients’.) Additionally, personal connections usually don’t have very good upload bandwidth, and the connections aren’t routed or designed to accommodate low ping upload streams, they’re much more focussed on creating low ping download streams, meaning P2P connections will generally always have some form of lag and advantage to a particular player.
The second way multiplayer games are run is on a Dedicated Server. This is basically an xbox in a data centre located somewhere that hosts the game for all players, these data centres have extremely good upload bandwidth and can provide quite low pings to players (but once again, it depends on how far away you are from the data centre that’s hosting the game). Not only is it fair for all players of the game but everyone will have a fantastic low ping.
Halo mostly uses P2P but the thing is, Microsoft has data centres (known as Azure Data Centres) all over the world, and there is definitely one for Great Brittain just as there is one in Sydney for Australia, it’s extremely frustrating when these services aren’t being used for our multiplayer games, but there’s not much we can do other than complain, everything to do with networking is handled automatically by xbox live and the game so we don’t have much control. Other games like CoD and Titanfall use dedicated servers for almost all matches making things a little frustrating.
Another factor is matchmaking. If you’re searching in a playlist and the game can’t find enough players or lobbies to connect you to people in your own region, it will quickly branch out and match you with players from the US (because there is generally always more people in the US online and looking for games). This is in the interest of game searches not taking too long but the thing is us regional players will ALWAYS have a terrible experience playing against and with players from the US.
Halo 5 is toted as ustilising the full power of Microsofts Azure Date Centres and I’ve heard reports that 343i IS including an option to select our prefered Data Centre (just like Titanfall does), if this is true then you won’t have to worry! Just select GB from the list and get playing.
If you’re experiencing lag or latency in older Halos, it’s most likely because someone is hosting a game P2P that doesn’t have a good upload bandwidth, or doesn’t live very close to you.
To answer your questions - A VPN won’t help you, because ultimately the data still has to travel exactly the same physical distance. You have great upload bandwidth so you’d be able to host games quite well for people in your area. Other than that I’m afraid it all depends on forces outside our control! In terms of router settings, make sure all the xbox live ports are port forwarded (google xbox live port forwarding), this is to make sure your NAT is open, if it’s open already you probably don’t need to worry.
Hope this sheds some light.
Wolfie