  In today's rapidly expanding digital landscape, where access to timely online
content is paramount to users, the underlying network infrastructure and
latency performance significantly influence the user experience. We present an
empirical study of the current Internet's connectivity and the achievable
latencies to propose better routing paths if available. Understanding the
severity of the non-optimal internet topology with RIPE Atlas stats, we conduct
practical experiments to demonstrate that local traffic from the San Diego area
to the University of California, San Diego reaches up to Los Angeles before
serving responses. We examine the traceroutes and build an experimental overlay
network to constrain the San Diego traffic within the city to get better
round-trip time latencies.
