I have at this moment 15ms from Italy to my broker in the US. I could make a screenshot, but I am afraid to expose too much information. Asia would have to cover double the distance, but that would still be far under 100ms.
With all due respect, that is impossible. Unless you have found a way to go over the speed of light. 15 ms gives approx. 1000 km distance. I suspect that your broker's servers are located in Europe.
I am located in Italy. Ping to the above IP adress and back 15ms thru cloudflare. Fastest normal internet between London and east coast of the US seems to be about 45ms. Sorry, found lower on the test Total ping 56ms. Speed of light is around 300,000 km/sec. In fibreglass it is around 200,000km/sec. So 30ms for 6,000 km more or less. Which confirms that it will be rather 56ms and not 15ms.
If you want very low latency, less than 3ms or even 1ms, then the only way to get that it to be located at the same place where your broker is. And pick a broker that is located in the same place as the exchange of the instruments you trade. Only real way to do that would be through a VPS that is colocated with your broker's servers, or at least in the same city as your broker. So for example if you trade the ES and use CQG, then a VPS in chicago would be the way to go. This is the only way to have 1ms latency from Italy.
How would a VPS reduce latency for manual trading? It's adding another step in the process and probably even increasing latency. Your VPS could be located right next to the exchange but you still need to connect from your home to the VPS. For automated trading it definitely the best way to go, but for manual trading i don't think so.
Yes for automated trading VPS is king, but it's also very useful for discretionary chart trading. The VPS is always on so you can place orders on it without worrying about your home internet connection. For example simulated stop losses and market if touch orders live locally, so if anything happens to your computer, you're screwed. VPS helps with that. Internet connection redundancy is very important. Even big mike from futures.io forum has multiple bonded ISP connections. I'll admit back when I used www.speedytradingservers.com I also thought vps was only for automated trading because it was too laggy for chart trading. But I've since switched to www.ninjamobiletrader.com and it doesn't lag at all. I think speedy just had underpowered servers. I've lost a lot more from trading errors due to internet connection than I'd like to admit, so VPS trading has more than paid for itself already and the only guarantee for reliable connection. Also being able to transfer my entire trading environment from desktop to android is very useful for discretionary chart trading. Instead of waiting all day in front of my computer for the setup that follows my entry rules, I can just wait for the setup on my phone while doing other stuff, and place limit orders around my various breakout strategies on my phone and not even need my desktop anymore.
I'm also in Singapore but don't have these issues. I'm with TDA. The worse is when I get a few seconds delay viewing charts when I toggle between stocks in my list. Then again, I'm not concerned with speed execution as I trade stocks over weeks. I do care about latency when I play video games though! VPNs are useful only in that you have more options to route your IP to the end server. Sometimes I get a better ping with one or another, but probably nothing that would be obvious for trading. When gaming, anything over 220 is unplayable. Depending on time of day it's not unusual to get pings of 210 to 350.