Ok, several days later and many multi-hour waits to get through to someone who knows something at Earthlink has finally resulted in this posting since I can't get help any other way. Maybe someone can shed some light on if anyone is working on this particular problem. Oakland, CA POP for mindspring/earthlink appears to have significant latency and packet loss problems for the last week or so independent of time of day. This appears to happen either through a session via bbnplanet links or even through their own peering sessions there. This might very well be nothing more than a BBNPlanet meltdown in San Jose, however the first two included traceroutes show something other than BBN... Any clues or anyone from either of these places care to comment? Examples include: 1 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms netopia.cstone.com [192.168.124.1] 2 20 ms 40 ms 30 ms user-38lc1g1.dialup.mindspring.com [209.86.6.1] 3 90 ms 360 ms 30 ms cisco-g4-0-0.oak.mindspring.net [209.86.81.129] 4 460 ms * 441 ms serial2-0-9.hsipaccess1.SanFrancisco1.Level3.net [166.90.48.37] ... 1 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms netopia.cstone.com [192.168.124.1] 2 151 ms 60 ms 20 ms user-38lc1g1.dialup.mindspring.com [209.86.6.1] 3 30 ms 30 ms 30 ms cisco-g4-0-0.oak.mindspring.net [209.86.81.129] 4 470 ms 481 ms 471 ms sl-gw9-sea-1-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.218.5] 5 470 ms 461 ms 461 ms sl-bb10-sea-1-3.sprintlink.net [144.232.6.101] ... 1 <10 ms 10 ms <10 ms netopia.cstone.com [192.168.124.1] 2 30 ms 30 ms 30 ms user-38lc1g1.dialup.mindspring.com [209.86.6.1] 3 30 ms 30 ms 30 ms cisco-g4-0-0.oak.mindspring.net [209.86.81.129] 4 30 ms 40 ms 30 ms s3-1-0.oakland-cr2.bbnplanet.net [4.0.68.117] 5 30 ms 40 ms 30 ms f0-0.oakland-br1.bbnplanet.net [4.0.16.1] 6 30 ms 40 ms 30 ms p5-2.snjpca1-cr1.bbnplanet.net [4.0.1.194] 7 30 ms 30 ms 40 ms p1-0.snjpca1-br1.bbnplanet.net [4.24.9.133] 8 451 ms 441 ms 450 ms p2-0.paix-bi1.bbnplanet.net [4.24.7.62] 9 431 ms 440 ms 441 ms p7-0.paix-bi2.bbnplanet.net [4.0.3.142] ... 8 * 30 ms 30 ms p9-0.snjpca1-br2.bbnplanet.net [4.24.9.130] 9 20 ms 30 ms 40 ms p1-0.sjccolo-dbe2.bbnplanet.net [4.24.6.249] 10 30 ms 40 ms 30 ms p6-0.sanjose1-nbr2.bbnplanet.net [4.0.6.233] 11 30 ms * 30 ms p12-0-0.sanjose1-cr2.bbnplanet.net [4.0.3.198] 12 431 ms 440 ms 461 ms s2-1-0.xsanjose15-abovenet.bbnplanet.net [4.0.85.5] 13 431 ms * 441 ms core6-sjc6-oc3.sjc1.above.net [207.126.96.105]