Network/Internet professionals come

My friend and I live in the same city. He has Fiber internet and gets 9 ping to the closest server.

I have Spectrum, which is cable Internet, 500mbps, but my ping is 20 at its lowest.

I thought only location mattered for ping and not ISP, so why does my friend get 9 ping?

im pretty sure it has to do with one being a fiber internet and another using spectrum technology

I have Spectrum too, at my local LAN cafe its 10 ping (I think it's the fiber internet) while I get 30 ping at home

Loads of different factors.

ping is latency, which is more than just distance from server.

Is one of you on wifi and the other on ethernet?

On top of that, you're both using different internet technologies anyway, so there's a big diff there already.

There's a lot of variables in play bruv, but you need to think about it in terms of a network and not just location.

To get to Valorant servers, you need to get from:
your computer -> your gateway in your home -> infrastructure back to your ISP -> out their core infrastructure to the rest of the internet -> get to the ISP of the Riot servers (in the datacenter where the servers are), then to the Valorant server itself (and back to you).

If you want to know exactly where you're gaining latency, you would both want to run traceroutes to the server and see which hops are taking longer for you (and which different hops you take than he does)

Server IPs for traceroutes are here, but article is a little old so I cant really confirm how valid it is now:
https://support-valorant.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047225674-How-to-Use-Tracert-to-Obtain-Network-Logs