So all the poker guys here in Costa got word that there is going to be maintenance on one of the submarine cables that provides internet to the region and that internet service may be slow and interrupted. Its kind of snowballed into paranoia that we won't have internet for the weekend (its one of the biggest weekends online of the year). There's scant information out there so we're trying our best to figure out what the best plan is.

The system they're working on is Maya-1 but after looking here its quite clear that Costa Rica has more than one submarine cable system routed into the country.

http://www.submarinecablemap.com/

I'm guessing that where we're at probably will have the delays but what I'm trying to figure out is if moving further south in the country will increase our chances of stable internet because of the PAC system that runs in there. I don't really know anything about any of this though other than what I've been looking at the past couple hours so I was wondering if that makes sense. Its too late to call the internet companies unfortunately plus I don't speak nearly good enough Spanish anyway to figure anything out.

Also, is there anyway to figure out which cable your ISP is using? I'm not even sure I even really understand how this all works so there is a solid chance I sound like a moron but just wanted to see if anyone can explain any of this or direct me to some good resources on the matter.

If your service provider is reasonably legit, they would have more than one connection to the country. I have no idea what the ISP's are like down there. Even if your ISP does use multiple cables though, you can imagine how cutting bandwidth capacity by 1/2 or 1/3 could result in an overloaded network.

Depending upon architecture, there's a chance that you could figure out which cable you're currently using by running traceroutes and looking at the hop locations based on name or IP address. http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/162326

If there is more than one cable going in and out of the country (there should be more than 1 route!), you can try to hop to there instead of your default route. Either by setting a VPN on a network that already uses that hop,or by other more complicated means. Either way,it's doable.

As others have said, it's more the ISP you are using rather than your physical location.

A few years ago we experienced a submarine cable problem - one of our overseas offices - where the cable was actually severed. Whilst it was not the only submarine cable, the latency on the remaining lines made the internet almost unusable. Web pages were OK, not great but OK, but VPNs and streaming were so unreliable that staff were unable to work.