Location of voip service providers important?

[NewUserFromBA]

I live in the SF Bay Area and need to choose a service provider or two. Is geographic location of SP an important factor in voice quality? My thinking is that with everything else being equal, a SP closer to me would be a better choice because of reduced latency. For example, if most of my calls are local, it would introduce unnecessary latency (an important criteria for voip experience) if the SP servers are located in the east coast, wouldn't it? Or do they all have servers distributed across the country? How do I go about finding out the latencies? I found it for CallCentric but not for others.

http://www.callcentric.com/faq/6/102

Thanks for any help!

[Lavarock7]

For Voip.Ms

http://wiki.voip.ms/article/Choosing_Server

[Shale]

Use ping from a command window on your computer. sip.anveo.com is Anveo's server closest to you.

ping  sip.anveo.com
would ping 4 times in windows.

ping -n 200 sip.anveo.com
would ping 200 times in windows. In some OSs, you would use -c instead of -n

[dircom]

interesting... I live in VA
for voip.ms I get

Seattle   108 ms
London   103
LA         86
Tampa    53
Dallas     49
NY         26

[Lavarock7]

There are big "pipes" up the east Cost. It does not surprise me that NY is your best choice (lower is betetr)