If you have Roadrunner I feel for you.
Roadrunner is well known for their poor routing when it comes to latency. If I want to connect to a computer 4 miles from my house which is in Milwaukee, RR routes the packets through Dallas! 2200 miles of fiber for a 4-mile distance. When I connect to a Chicago server, the packets go through New York! It wasn't always this way. RR used to peer with many more providers earlier this year. Then for whatever reason, they droped many of them and my ping went from 50 to 150. Go to
http://www.samspade.org and download Sam Spade 1.14 and do a traceroute to the server in question. By looking at the DNS names, you'll get an idea of where your packets are traveling. Then you can voice your concerns with the cable company. Good Luck...
stattik