In many (perhaps even the majority) of the cases, it has basically boiled down to issues with the interconnects between the various ISP's involved in getting your data back and forth to the game servers. There has been an ongoing issue for several years trying to combat port congestion at these exchanges. The ISP's are basically not updating their peering agreements to accommodate the big increases in network traffic. Lean on your ISP's to investigate the issues upstream from your local connection. Need to push through to tier3 or higher to get it addressed. The tier1/tier2 guys you are dealing with when you call in or that come to your house to test your lines can do nothing about it--it needs to go further up the chain.
copy/pasting passages from another thread on the issue:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post2205209
It actually isn't perfect. Pathping hides some data that may indicate potential issues. Around Chicago on Level3 could have lag spikes that are not accurately demonstrated in this report. It is a VERY common issue with TWC these days, and it comes and goes at odd times:
snapshot updates periodically, based on source data from here:
http://downdetector.com/status/time-warner-cable
You can see similar charts for lots of web servics (and even some ISP's) from the same site here:
http://downdetector.com/companies
If you actually take some time to track this stuff, you can see the ebb and flow of this problem all over the place.
http://www.akamai.com/html/technolog...try/index.html
At specific times of day, you may see the same areas line up with problems across multiple services because it is due to regional problems amongst the ISP's.
Again, the following snapshots are dynamic and will update periodically throughout the day. Source pages are linked below each.
AT&T map:
http://downdetector.com/status/att
Netflix map:
http://downdetector.com/status/netflix
PSN map:
http://downdetector.com/status/playstation-network
XBL map:
http://downdetector.com/status/xbox-live