My worst troubles on my 7Mb/768kbps line all started during that halloween blizzard in the northest usa a few years ago. It was that storm that started my issues. A line came down and they did a bad splice fixing it. 90% of lines here are copper, there is only fiber on some main lines, none to any homes. The 'fixed' line had 66% packet loss and as a result horribly inconsistent pings. During that halloween I somehow managed to stay in gw, my traffic must have been rerouted to some extent...I VQed Dalada Uplands with an in game ping of up to 180,000ms, yes 3 minutes, idk how gw didn't boot me out. I would notice my heros stopped and keep going, I would scout where groups were, then what can only be described as "the rubberband from hell" would happen and BOOOOOIIIINNNGGG back to my heros I would go.
Inconsistent internet is the worst, slow but stable is better-ish, best is getting what you pay for. It just plain sucks when they can't figure out the problem. Have you tried something like traceroute? Ping Plotter works better than a plain old traceroute, it does ping and packet loss for every hop with a better gui than a command line interface. It's the only thing that got my line fixed, they kept saying everything checked out fine until I used it and told them exactly what hop the loss was happening at.
I have done Cisco's CCNA 1 through 4 (Cisco Certified Network Associate) training course, which teaches you just about anything about the internet and how it works on a very technical level.
I'm without a doubt better educated on the matter than the employees of my ISP...
It's just completely out of my hands, the issue seems to be that the modem reverts to completely wrong configurations or that the network box in my street is malconfigured and is causing the issues - that is at least what I expect - everything up to the physical layer (OSI-7) goes through normally. So now I have to suffer through their support
My speeds are artificially low, the connection itself is good, but due to this the speed and quality are just unreliable. Everything lags like hell.
A slow speed is bearable if the quality is good enough, but this ís hardly so.
And command line for the win ;3