I also live in Northern VA and have Verizon FiOS.

My connection was fine through the beta, and fine through early access. Last night (8/26/13), I started lagging pretty badly similar to what KMarsara described. The game will pause for a few seconds at a time and then catch up.

It's really inconvenient for healing.

Today (8/27/13), I was able to connect to the game, but disconnected and then my entire internet just went down until I closed out of the FFXIV client.

Things I did: Reset router, restarted computer, port forwarding.

I called Verizon, and they reset my IP. I was able to get into the game and stay in the game after they did so (although it was a close call when I was completing a quest turn-in), but it was still pretty laggy with the pauses for a few seconds at a time.

I called Verizon back to have them run a diagnostic on my connection, and they didn't find anything. They offered to reset my service and did so.

I haven't been able to get back into the game because of the login throttle, but I'm wondering if there's a problem with Verizon. If it's not a problem with Verizon, if someone could offer any potential solution, it would be greatly appreciated.

As a side note, I'm not sure what good "sending" and "receiving" numbers are, but both of mine seem to drop to 0 from time to time.