OK so I did a bit of digging and found nearly all US - Portugal internet traffic uses the UK for transit. Real-world UK-CHI is about 130ms. Add another 40ms for the UK-PT hop = 170ms (Portugal-Chicago). These are the sub-marine cable systems linking Portugal with the UK: Doesn.t look great to me... West African Cable System (WACS) 2012 Europe India Gateway (EIG) 2011 Tata TGN-Western Europe 2002 SeaMeWe-3 1999 Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) 2012 TAGIDE 2 1996 Eurafrica 1992 Columbus-III 1999