its pritty simple, the reality as regards generic TCP/IP is that you dont know from packet to packet what route it will take to an end point IP, one bunch might take a fast ISP route to the end point, another bunch the slower ISP route, they all end up at the end point IP OC, but its mostly out of your control.
its werse today than years ago OC, given ISP's today like their shinny new toys that look good on the investors reports such as, DPI, STM, and QOS for slowing down far more non realtime (in their view) open generic TCP binary data packets etc far more today....
a basic outline is this: the idea behind all tunnels (another popular name for them is VPN ,virtual Private Network) is you have an entry point and an exit or fixed "end point", hence your basic "point to point" unicast networking.
as long as you have that tunneled end point to connect to
all the time, and your both talking the same language/protocol then over time the packets will usually find a way to route by the fastest routes over all the router hops to that end point far more often.
the ISP's/webs routers all see the same external "this is a tunnel" data, and so try and route it and its contents better,faster,etc, think of a tunnel as a wrapper or generic pipe.
BUT you can put anything you like inside that tunnel wrapper, be it game data, Multicast protocol data packets that cant usually go over the web as the worlds ISPs filter it off before it get to/from your Broadband CPE modem kit sat on your desk, or popular again IPv6 running inside the generic IPv4 tunnels such as the free tunnel services
http://www.go6.net/4105/freenet.asp
and their old Quake 3 IPv6 Project
http://www.go6.net/4105/description....ategory_id=276
as you might guess, usually..., if you and your friends on totally different ISPs are all using the same tunnel software and the end point HW is fast enough, then your all connected virtually to the same end point, and should be seeing all your TCP/IP packets getting routed faster through the tunnel ,and so, seeing far better pings etc
you can also think of the go6 tunnel as a virtual ISP, as in effect the likes of freenet6/go6 are exactly that, at least when it comes to their IPv4 to IPv6 tunnels.
not to mention everyone on there are in effect on a massive world wide virtual IPv6 LAN with one or two hops to any go6 connected IPv6 IP, no matter if its on a real fast Co-Location server, or your home PC running your web server over Ipv6 over your VM ISP's crappy upload speeds.
there are other popular free tunnels , the lad uses them for his mates private (emulation) gaming etc dark nets, but for the life of me,i cant remember that name right now, and i was the one that told him about them a long time ago now LOL
, in effect that to, makes a "virtual LAN" "tunnel" between all the real LANs and the games just see a LAN connection they can use to connect.
all these VPN "tunnels" are the same, ISPs routers even today seem to try and find the fastest routes possible for this traffic and so anything you put inside them see the benefit, you do loose some slight over all data throughput as the tunnels are fixed size and take up a small fixed amount of data packets before you even wrap up your data and push anything down them OC, the wrapping up can be a stand alone app, or more likely built into the tunnel, or as with the go6 stuff is IPv6, the OS TCP v6 network stack knows that its wrapped packets are using v6 IP addresses and knows that tunnel is the only v6 outlet/gateway so sends it through there.
did i over do it as to techy again
, or did you get at least some of that?