Perculiar Connection Issues

Hey,

Right a while ago i moved to uni, and lo and behold guild wars was blocked by their firewall and i looked at a few options and spoke to the IT department to see if i could get access but to no avail.

However a couple weeks later one drunken evening i tried to login and it suddenly decided to connect, and has continued to connect since.

I dunno what they must've changed but as cool as it is it now connects, the connection is very odd. My ping constantly jumps all over the shop, literally from like 32 to 700 to 45 to 200 to 1000ms etc etc. It tends to be more affected the higher the number of players in the map, for instance its never that bad in RA but in GvG i lag out completely.

I'm guessing its something to do with GW's networking connections, because the internet is very fast otherwise, and i get a constant ping of 20-30 on call of duty 4 and other online games.

So my question is what would it be that GW is doing diffferently and what do i need to try and change or talk to the IT lot about fixing it if possible?

Cheers

Lots of people have been having wierd lag like that for the past couple of months, theres a myriad of threads like these all over the shop.

Not that I'm suggesting you do this, but, if you run a tracer to look at the path any internet connection takes to get from you to there, you'd see that the route goes through many "nodes" to get where it's going, and the routes to different addresses can go through different nodes to get there. There can easily be a node (or nodes) between you and GW that is causing problems, while the route you take to get to CoD4 (for example) does not go through those bad nodes. That is why you can have bad lag on some sites and not others.
Those who play games such as Counterstrike or TFC, where the servers can be located all over the place, are familiar with this.

So, basically, if your internet connection is good, and if ANet is not having problems, then it could be any one of the dozen or so nodes between you and them.

So i had a go at the trace route thing, and it looked like this:



So it seems to get to the london gw servers (i'm assuming thats what the lond-gw-ixp1 part is), but then what's all this request timed out imply?