Vastly different latency to 1.1.1.1, Same country

Hello

I live in Saudi Arabia and we have two main ISP companies, one called “STC” and the other is “Mobily”.

I have a fiber line from “Mobily”, and the latency to 1.1.1.1 is ~23ms which is great, and my friend has a fiber line from “STC”, and his latency to 1.1.1.1 is ~120ms, and we live in the same building.

So went to investigate a bit and tried to trace route the connection to 1.1.1.1 on my connection and on his, turns out on my connection I arrive to 1.1.1.1 right after my ISP with only 3 hops, but with his connection it goes through 13 hops to get to the same destination.

Traceroute has started…

traceroute to 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1), 64 hops max, 72 byte packets
 1  192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1)  1.632 ms  1.322 ms  1.238 ms
 2  46.153.64.1 (46.153.64.1)  56.692 ms  22.505 ms  27.733 ms
 3  one.one.one.one (1.1.1.1)  27.063 ms  22.792 ms  25.331 ms

and on his connection

traceroute to 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1), 64 hops max, 72 byte packets
 1  192.168.100.1 (192.168.100.1)  16.205 ms  5.288 ms  14.158 ms
 2  185.76.138.6 (185.76.138.6)  24.352 ms  23.345 ms  54.720 ms
 3  10.188.201.25 (10.188.201.25)  19.953 ms  33.669 ms  29.766 ms
 4  10.188.201.7 (10.188.201.7)  44.924 ms  49.516 ms  29.839 ms
 5  10.188.195.8 (10.188.195.8)  105.483 ms  108.698 ms  119.995 ms
 6  de-cix-frankfurt.as13335.net (80.81.194.180)  104.859 ms  109.912 ms  129.603 ms
 7  one.one.one.one (1.1.1.1)  105.324 ms  109.451 ms  130.173 ms

notice that my ping is not stable because I’m connecting from a point where my Wi-Fi and my friend’s Wi-Fi are reachable to do the testing.

My question is what did “Mobily” do to lower the ping and limit the hops ? Is it something they’ve done or Cloudflare parted with them or something ?, I just need a bit of explaining about the matter, and what the other ISP “STC” should do to achieve a better latency with 1.1.1.1 ?

I’m asking here because I know my ISP support won’t have any idea about what I just wrote.

His ISP routes him to Germany.