If it is the same thing that is causing all our issues then at least it'd seem it's not just isolated to one place/country. That said for me as well some hops of course do go via nodes in France on the way to the servers. I realy don't think it's a reasonable solution to be forced to use either a VPN or other software to connect to the game. And at least for me it's meant more frequent disconnects than I'd normally have before these connection issues. It's been almost 4 months and there's been barely any help from SE. Just the same canned instructions from support and being told just to report the connection issues.