Disconnected at random

[SilvanSataka]

Guys, please have a look at my workaround: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...eviation-issue

My connection was dropping like every 15-30 minutes. With my new workaround my connection is now super stable. Played for five hours straight without any connection drop today.

[Raist]

I haven't, but since this problem has been going on for months (nearly a year) and affects only this single Internet activity, it's unlikely to be a routing problem. It certainly wouldn't be any kind of outage, as it would have to have been out for a protracted period of time and the network infrastructure of North America is simply not THAT awful (it's pretty awful, but that's pushing it).

Well.. it's been almost a year now (March 2014) since filings were made at the FCC about how certain ISP's were intentionally neglecting to upgrade bandwidth at the exchange points, effectively choking bandwidth. Similar filings were made over a year prior from another company (TATA) as well. In the 2014 filings, it was revealed that even when one of their routing partners (Level3) that was trying to resolve the issue for some of these ISP's offered to pay a large portion of the costs for upgrades to accommodate the increased demands on the exchanges, the offer was rejected. These incidents have been a big driving force behind the Net Neutrality movement that has been going on for over a year now as well.

And this isn't the first time we've gone through these headaches either. Level3 went to AT&T about these kinds of issues back in 2011 as well...and it was still a problem when they filed with the FCC last year. I've been seeing it crop it's ugly head up off and on for various services (not JUST games) across different regions since I started gaming online almost 20 years ago. It is a known and documented problem in the industry...it is just kept under wraps so the unsuspecting public doesn't hold them accountable. We are paying them to maintain the networks and they keep jacking up the rates while the QoS continues to get lower and lower. So long as the uninformed want to go on blaming Netflix or the game developers for the shoddy network infrastructure... they continue to get away with over charging people for sub-par internet service.

So... yes... there is a pretty good chance that along the particular route(s) you may be getting assigned for getting to Ormuco in Montreal may have some segments that have been neglected for a long time. And here's the rub... so long as people continue to poo-poo the idea that there may be something going on between any number of the dozen or so hops between their system and the destination, it may never get resolved properly. That's how they've managed to get away with this "speeds up to X Mbit/sec" crap for 20 some-odd years. They won't guarantee a specific speed because they know they can't since they've grossly oversold the local bandwidth against their top-tier exchange's bandwidths.

EDIT:
Here are a series of blog posts that may help clarify things for some of you guys that aren't up to speed on what all this is about:

“Chicken” | A Game Played as a Child and by some ISPs with the Internet
Observations of an Internet Middleman
When the Middleman and ISP are Aligned
Heads ISPs Win, Tails You Lose (And a way to fix it)
Verizon’s Accidental Mea Culpa
“Not” Neutrality?

Here's a snippet from that last one, where they were illustrating one of the problems they've found:

But it is now late September. So what has changed? Well, let us look at three large Local Exchange Carriers (LECs) in the United States. These LECs are telephone companies that built broadband networks on the back of monopoly-funded telephone infrastructure. Over the past six months, the utilization of each interconnection location between their networks and Level 3’s has changed as shown in the following diagram.



Each number shows utilization at one of the interconnection locations in various cities throughout the United States between Level 3 and the LECs. Utilization above 85% indicates the LEC is causing congestion in that city by refusing to add interconnection capacity