I get High(er) pings also. But remember it is the server doing a shed load (a lot) of work for the clients. I have played many games on a 64K link which ran perfectly. 32 players or more. Perfectly.
It's the server that is crap.
Some of the servers you see listed are just guys like u or I making their machine a server (u can see this from looking at the players and one guy has zero ping). They want 10 players to join so they can frag everybody else, but THEIR machine can't cope with the cpu. Oh yeah, game still runs fine for mr hotshot, but we get lag (and die).
I have done lots of testing of this in the past week and I can say that good, dedicated servers are cool. 64K access not a prob, runs like its on a LAN. Pick a crap server, ppl just want you for frag counts
Steel