Latency issues

[Raist]

Well, all this sound alien to me. I want the services I pay for to work without me putting the work extensively.
The problem started immediately after last Maintenance. I was online exactly before the maintenance and as soon as it ended. The problem started immediately.
It's on Square's end.

There are 5 ISP's that feed all the data to Ormuco, SE's ISP. Not one of those ISP's has more than 4 routes specifically into Montreal...some only have 2 or 3. There are north of 40,000 ISP's in the world.

Basically, we are all getting crammed into some narrow pipes along the way, and they can get congested at anytime for a long list of reasons. As we become more and more dependent on the internet for so many things, it just gets worse and worse. Note that it's not just the game traffic you are contending with--financial and other business related traffic, facebook and twitter, our phones, our TV... everything is digital now and takes a slice of the bandwidth throughout all markets you travel through on the way to Ormuco in Montreal. Not uncommon for a household with streamers/gamers to consume a DVD's worth of data (4.38Gigabytes) per day, and most of that gets packed into a short window during primetime. Bottlenecks and failures occur sometimes with no warning whatsoever, and they are becoming more and more frequent as people use it more and more.

Edit:
For a bit of a visual, here is a trace to the IP I have been using for Midgard lately:

C:\Windows\System32>tracert 199.91.189.31

Tracing route to 199.91.189.31 over a maximum of 30 hops

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  LPTSRV [10.10.100.1]
  2    17 ms    17 ms    21 ms  cpe-75-176-160-1.sc.res.rr.com [75.176.160.1]
  3    31 ms    32 ms    31 ms  cpe-024-031-198-009.sc.res.rr.com [24.31.198.9]
  4    20 ms    19 ms    20 ms  24.31.196.212
  5   125 ms   125 ms   115 ms  be33.chrcnctr01r.southeast.rr.com [24.93.64.182]
  6    30 ms    29 ms    30 ms  bu-ether24.atlngamq46w-bcr00.tbone.rr.com [107.14.19.18]
  7    24 ms    26 ms    25 ms  0.ae2.pr0.atl20.tbone.rr.com [107.14.19.11]
  8    25 ms    26 ms    27 ms  te0-0-0-10.ccr21.atl02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.12.109]
  9    28 ms    28 ms    29 ms  be2050.ccr41.atl01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.0.165]
 10    35 ms    34 ms    38 ms  be2168.ccr21.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.31.94]
 11    42 ms    39 ms    41 ms  be2148.ccr41.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.31.118]
 12    44 ms    45 ms    45 ms  be2106.ccr21.alb02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.3.50]
 13   185 ms   193 ms   207 ms  be2088.ccr21.ymq02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.43.17]
 14    63 ms    63 ms    65 ms  38.122.42.34
 15    47 ms    47 ms    49 ms  192.34.76.10
 16    50 ms    51 ms    50 ms  199.91.189.242
 17    47 ms    48 ms    50 ms  199.91.189.31

Trace complete.

Notice the big latency spike at hop 5 as I am coming through the Charlotte, NC area. Notice that it happens again just as I am coming into Montreal at hop 13. Latency spikes stack. Any hiccups along this route can be tied into something going on in Charlotte, and have virtually nothing to do with the servers in Montreal--I have to go through Charlotte on my way to Montreal on this path. Note I just got flipped to Cogent...I was on TATA when I looked at it just a few nights ago. SE didn't change this... my ISP did.

When you call your ISP and they look at your "connection", what they are most likely looking at is your connection to the first or maybe second hop past your local network. They aren't looking at the thousands and thousands of potential routes you may take at any given moment to get to any one of millions of IP addresses worldwide that are hosted on other people's networks. In this case, they would be looking at hop #2 in my trace. They MIGHT look further down the line to the 3rd or 4th hop because they are still in the South Carolina area---but they won't be looking much deeper than that. In this scenario, the problem appears to show up in NORTH Carolina...so that helpdesk employee is not going to see the problem. They are often not authorized/empowered to look much deeper than your localized connectivity issues. This is something that Tier3 support CAN and SHOULD look at...as it is part of their job. Tier3 has the knowledge, access, and tools to conduct a much more thorough investigation into your specific route that is having issues.