Square recently did a presentation on their whole PlayOnline and FFXI infrastructure and the following points may be of interest to some US players:

1. They do plan to launch the game overseas, hence this data.
2. The servers are housed in Otemachi, Tokyo.
3. The ping time they were observing from ISPs such as UUnet, or universities was 150ms.
4. For some reason AOL had a bit of a problem in that the ping times are 300-450ms. So, AOL users would likely lose connection quite a bit.

There's other bits and pieces but that is the gist of it. They said that people with good narrowband connections have a better connection to the game than people with bad broadband connections. That is the same in Japan too.


Original report is here: Click