Unacceptable lag during endgame content.

[Raist]

got a little weirdness right out the gate in your initial gateways--lag spike that triples, and you got a timeout as well. This could be kicking in again later when you finally get over to Montreal, where you got another spike near the end. That close to home, you should have a much more consistent response time.

We've been seeing the same thing happen here in the states as well with TWC. The head ends are over saturated and simply buckle under the congestion. Yours was less obvious in your traces, but there may be something there (we see spikes crossing into 1000ms or more--that's 1 second or more). If you can get snapshots when things are good along with when things are bad, you may see a much wider variance at specific spots in the route. Would also be a good idea to take some against another site, like Google or Yahoo. This should send up a flag that it's not JUST SE's servers, but potentially all things you do on the internet, hopefully convincing them to look further into your claim instead of just writing you off with the usual "it's how the internet works" kind of responses.

Again, this likely isn't the full solution, but it can be a large part of it. There are things that SE is working on with their servers and network that are a part of the problem as well. But that is only part of the problem. Even when a service is running near perfectly, these kinds of issues can and do degrade services. Ever have a video stream stop to buffer midway through? That shouldn't happen with a high speed line, right? These types of hiccups in route can potentially be part of that same problem as well.

So it is worth looking into, just in case you indeed are getting hit both in route AND at SE's end. Mileage can vary on what you may find, as well as how your ISP will respond. This is a way to demonstrate to them that there may be congestion issues or packet losses along your route that is impacting your quality of service. Each company has different policies regarding QoS (most the time, it's BS that covers their butts more than anything)... but it does give you something to work with if you need to pursue it further with advocacy. Wish we had such an option here in the states... all we can do is threaten to switch carriers. Problem is, many of us don't have another carrier to switch to for the speeds we need.