SICK OF THE LAG FEST

[Raist]

You shouldn't have to go through this crap for one game. I'm in Australia playing on a JP server and heaps of Aussies seem to be having trouble and it's only started in the last few days. If it keeps up I'll just cancel my sub and move on rather than dick around VPNs and routing.

If you had a bad route to Netflix, it could be the same--there would be millions of customers not affected, but it could be only people from your region/provider that are having problems. If it was your path to PSN or XBL...it could be the same. It could be because of problems in particular regions you are routed through to get to the service and not the service itself.

Until you rule out the known network issues that have been documented time and time again to be at the very least an important contributing factor and correctable by your ISP and/or their routing partners---you can't just dump it all on SE's shoulders.

Have you at least tried checking the status of your service provider? Some have their own internal page (like Telstra), or you can try one of the tracking sites like the downdetector group here in the US. They have a separate site just for Australia as well, called aussieoutages.com:

https://aussieoutages.com/companies

Just glancing at a handful of services/ISP's there seems to be a consistent issue along mostly the southern and eastern borders, but there are also reports coming from the west coast as well. Not talking exactly backwater towns here either---Sidney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adalaide, to name a few.

Those names may not sound that important to you until you look at how traffic gets routed. For example, take a look at a couple network maps. Notice how traffic is routed to North America. Keep in mind that some of the smaller last mile ISP's will use another companyi's undersea lines for transit--so even if you subscribe to Adam or someone else, you may be using Telstra or SingTel for the intercontinental transit.

http://maps.telstraglobal.com/
http://business.singtel.com/coverage/googlemaps/

The same kind of thing happens again when you get stateside. You can get crammed onto a crappy Level3 route to get into Montreal for this game, but for any other service you may get a cleaner route through TATA, Cogent, ATT, or even XO---it depends on how you are getting routed to a specific destination. Just like if you were driving, flying, or traveling by train---the path to Chicago or Miami will be different than to Montreal....and you run the risk of running into slowdowns/delays for a host of reasons no matter what mode of transit you are using to get there.