Lag issue, losing packets.

[Raist]

http://www.akamai.com/html/technolog...try/index.html
http://www.akamai.com/html/technolog...b-monitor.html
http://www.akamai.com/html/technolog...b-metrics.html
https://downdetector.com/companies

Internet usage across various industries has been hitting strange peaks off and on. When things get concentrated in the same corridors, it creates extremely high congestion. Many of the lower tiered ISP's that we buy our service from are reluctant to upgrade bandwidth at the exchange points into the larger networks they peer with to get us there. That is why sometimes you get better results with a VPN--it is giving you a shot at getting around bad routing. Results can vary though, since you can still get into a bad segment on the other side of a VPN--why it's important to sometimes check service against the other locations available with the service. Just last week I demonstrated how the NY connection was better than the Montreal one with the same service.

Keep in mind that these corridors are impacted by all internet traffic...not just gaming. Retail, financial, video streaming (including digital broadcast--the cable companies are sending video signals on the same lines carrying internet traffic, just on neighboring channels), social media---it all goes through the same routing equipment and contributes to it all at once. Note also there was recently a big dump of new DLC and new games as well--which has resulted in heightened usage for both the initial downloads and updates, as well as online play service going forward.

Here's some blog posts you may want to read up on if you want to learn more about our infrastructure woes. They're from some of the guys at Level3 (a top tier ISP that handle a major chunk of the traffic going to/from Montreal, amongst other regions). They explain a lot about what is going on:

“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?

But, for some quick and dirty visuals of what it all leads up to:

https://downdetector.com/status/comcast-xfinity ----- https://downdetector.com/status/att ------ https://downdetector.com/status/time-warner-cable


Those maps are archived images of services tracked at the downdetector site I linked to up top. The images will get updated periodically throughout the day, so may change when loaded again later. But if you look closely, you can see patterns forming in specific regions. It's all tied into the infrastructure issues discussed in those blog posts.