90k and super lag

[Raist]

Well I'm not in Canada. This issue has also been going on since the 2.28 update for most. I have been pretty much getting 90k every 10-20 min today alone.

Edit: and I have run ping and speed tests and everything checks out fine for me.

If you were in Canada, you would be less likely to be impacted, since the servers are already in Canada. The US more or less only has a handful of paths to take to get into Canada. The big 3 top tier ISP's (TATA, Level3, Cogent) all of our "last mile" ISP's (TWC, Comcast, etc.) mostly deal with for getting us into Canada have 8 routes between them (according to their last published maps)... 2 via the northwest, and 6 via the north east. So, when just one of these paths goes bonkers, it can affect a LOT of people. And traffic is steadily on the rise for the regions in question (the majority of this traffic goes through the North East corridor, as in New York or Massachusetts). I presented an overview of this to demonstrate the impact recently in another thread where I linked to the actual maps so you can see the routes I'm referencing.

Have to keep in mind also that it's not just gaming traffic impacting these routes. People are steadily trading in the traditional video services and switching to web based delivery methods (SmartTV, Consoles, Rokus, AppleTV's, etc.) resulting in ever increasing demand on these routes. You can easily see the traffic patterns ebb and flow if you view usage maps at sites like Akamai or downdetector.

http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz1.html
http://www.akamai.com/html/technolog...try/index.html
http://downdetector.com/companies
(the usage index by industry is interesting, as you can filter by region and type of traffic, and there is a graph showing recent hourly and monthly history).

Should also note that if you are in the US and dealing with services hosted in the US, you may not even be touching these top tier ISP's congested routes to get there---your ISP might even have a direct peering agreement with that service's ISP, or even the service itself if it has a strong enough demand and established network presence in the area to justify the investment.

Because of the tight situation in the North East that is handling not only the local traffic there, but a butt load of international traffic (traffic comes across the pond from the UK and such, as well as Canada to the north), a handful of last mile ISP's have been in a pissing contest since the first of the year after new regulatory rules were made that has prevented our ISP's from being held accountable to their consumers demand on the internet as a whole---Level3 has filed a formal complaint about it, more or less pleading with the regulators to change the rules so they more or less make these last mile ISP's play fairly--as in upgrade their peering agreements to better accommodate the needs of both the network providers and their own customers. As it stands right now, the Teir1 providers get all the heat because the Tier2/Tier3 users are not implementing enough ports/bandwidth sufficient for the demand put forth by their customers. The Tier1 fiber can handle the load just fine---but the exchanges set up by the Tier2/Tier3 peers (our ISP's) are buckling under the demand of their customers.

Here is a link to a blog post going into more detail about the issue, as well as a link to the brief if anyone is interested:
“Chicken” | A Game Played as a Child and by some ISPs with the Internet
(I must give credit to Xruptor for this find. This blog was linked from an article that was linked here:http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post2180728) It is all a very interesting read for those who really want a better understanding of the situation and want to take a more proactive stance with their ISP to try to push for changes.

So, basically... the fault ultimately lies in our ISP's for not setting up robust enough links to the "cloud" that is the internet.


Edit:
Spotted some signs of potential wonkiness from within Ormuco that might be worthy of investigation when playing with Level3's looking glass. Submitted a ticked to SE about it, still need to dig a bit to see if I can do the same to Ormuco. Might be something some of you want to tinker with to see if you spot the same weird spikes I did on the other side or not:
http://lg.level3.net/

[Xruptor]

Well I'm not in Canada.

Neither am I, I actually live in Illionois. No matter where you live in the United States the Square-Enix servers are still in Canada. So your connection has to be routed there. (This MAY or may not be different for some folks outside of the North American continent.) If you followed the guide I posted earlier in grabbing your server IP and using pingplotter then you should notice that your connection goes through Level 3 switches. That or you may be one of the ones where it goes through IWEB / TATA.

[Fidchel]

I've been following these threads for a few days now trying to diagnose my own connection issues. I haven't really gotten a report showing packet loss, but of course usually the lagging and dropping ends right about when I start running tests. I just found my server's actual IP from http://www.arrstatus.com/, and it appears I get run through the dreaded Level3 servers as well. It appears even the European servers are in Montreal.