I wish I had some of the problems others have out there. I'm in interior Alaska and my pings are consistently between 1700 and 3000 ms. It doesn't seem to matter much as I don't trade stocks only options.
If I said that I was not correct. We try to optimize your speed by determining which server to connect you to. ie. someone funding in HK dollars signing up for HK futures will be put on the US server. If you are euro funded and trade mostly european products then you'll be assigned to the euro server when you sign up. Natually this is an inexact science and if you want to change servers, send me a PM and I'll tell you where to direct the request.
If it was in this old thread http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=9402, Def never said that TWS always connect through the US server. He just said that we couldn't change the server config by ourself. The post above confirms this.
Yes you are right. I remembered it a bit wrong. He said that people with base currency USD allways connect through the US server, regardless of their settings in TWS.
Yes you are right. See my above post. However I still find it strange to let the user make a choice during TWS installation if he wants to connect through US or CH or HK and then connect him through a server of IB's choice anyway.
my quote above is wrong as well - hk$, hk fut should be = hk server. the choice for which server i believe has to do with firewalls and since i know nothing about setting up firewalls, I can't specify the reason . at least that is what i think my answer was when i asked the same question ages ago. in the end it normally doesn't make a huge difference except for the system reset times.