Connection Issues In Game and Out

Where to begin, not to be needlessly brutal on the IT/development departments but getting this game up and running from the initial patcher installation has been a nightmare - yes I understand the nuances of this situation from the size of the game to external factors that come into play BUT I haven't had this much frustration since... trying to download Ultima 7 on a 56k baud modem. The patcher freezes/crashes enough that I can't call it a "rarity" and the connection is like a roller coaster sometimes bottoming out at .09MB/sec... IF it stays connected.

Some background, I'm no stranger to the mysteries of network troubleshooting (IT major) so I've gone through all of what is considered standard procedure for resolving connection issues - to no avail. ISP reports nothing noteworthy, all the networking equipment as been power cycled more than twice and port forwarding, firewall/security are non-issues. I don't experience these issues when it comes any other heavy bandwidth activity so process of deduction points to you guys. Maybe it's the backbone, maybe it's the nodes along the way, not sure. But I'm going to run a Tracert to find out where exactly the issue lies... while I wait, lets see, 587 minutes for the rest of the 1.8G to download.

Win 10 - And my PC's specs are considerably beyond the minimum required.