Don't forget, even at the speed of light things take time.
It appears your trans Atlantic crossing from London to New York is about 60 ms, which is slightly better than average from what I have seen.
New York to Chicago transit time was about 20 ms, which is about 1/3 the distance from London to New York. About what I would expect.
Just adding this "transit" time up is 80 ms. Then deal with packet handling times within the routers and multiple network hops, add about another 30 ms on and you end up with around 110 ms. Then you have to factor in network loading, packet buffering as well as packet fill rates and then you start to have some differences and variations in the network response times.
Now if you ping or trace to
www.yahoo.com or some other sites that use mirrored servers, you will probably see the ping times fairly quick. It appears that Yahoo uses Akamai, which may actually host a cached server on site probably within the NTL network. This cuts down on the number of router hops and the "transit" time half way across the globe.
Now with BF2, the problem may also be with the server speed and network connection size to the specific server. Not sure how popular these games are, but I am sure during "local" prime time hours these servers and the connections that support them are designed to only handle a specific number of players and a certain amount of traffic loading before delays/latency becomes and issues.
Even with fiber to your house, you are still at the mercy of physics, the World Wide Web traffic loading, router processing speeds and and how big and saturated communication circuits are at any given point in time.
JamesO