So what prompts me to make this post is that I can't be the only one on earth (or at least the UK) to have constant, unresolved, ISP keep jabbering there's no problems their end, connection issues ongoing for years and years, at different addresses, with different ISP's, the works!

Determined to find the problem once and for all I messaged Stars, they did their network report thingy and said the usual...:

"The Network Status Report (NSR) you provided shows data packets lost at different hops for all the traced sites.

The issue for you is not your connection to your ISP as this is perfectly stable. This is shown in the first few hops having a quality of 100. The issue lies in between your ISP and our server, unfortunately, this is something that neither you or us can be responsible for.

You will need to contact your ISP and ask them to check if they are losing packets when they try to ping our server. You must tell them that your connection to their server is fine it is after the packet leaves their server that you experience issues. If possible ask if they can route your traffic to our servers through a different path."

So how many of you have had this problem and have you actually managed to resolve it with your ISP companies EVER EVER EVER?? Thanks

Perhaps posters should make it clear what country & what ISP or this will be a useless thread: The short answer is Yes, but not through normal ISP channels which are useless everywhere including no doubt in other galaxies too.

The fault lay with my ISP & their hardware & not with PokerStars. But my ISP [BT who don't give a fig] was useless whereas PokerStars support did all the heavy lifting to get me started on a fix for my problem

I'm UK. I've always used BT Broadband
PC connected to "BT Home Hub 3.0 model A" manufactured by Gigasetrouter via Ethernet cable

I did everything in the instructions provided by PokerStars Henry below except the bolded parts. I couldn't do those because on my particular router I couldn't change MTU & the firmware on it was way out of date. BT basically shrugged their shoulders & sent me repeated useless potted replies. I found a BT engineer through a friend-of-a-friend who called around on his time for free beers & a tinker. He did some magic & upgraded the firmware to a more recent version than BT provides. Bingo - problem solved.

From October 2015: NOTES

My problems only existed on some gaming/gambling sites & no other types of content [I don't do internet p0rn so can't comment], but I had parental controls disabled + my BT plan was for unlimited data use. I still have some lingering suspicion that BT was choking my comms with sites they didn't approve of, but that could be me in tinfoil hat mode.

I also had a USB stick router from Orange Mobile [£10 topup when I needed to use it] with tiny bandwidth as a backup internet for emergencies & never ever had the same problems. PokerStars very light on the internet.

The ports instructions in the Henry email were generic & it took a lot of internet research to translate it into instructions that made sense on my virtual BT router management console. But setting the correct ports did help me too.

you say you have tried multiple isp's. but were they actually seperate? did you do any research into them. in some countries you may see multiple companys offering internet service that you can hire, but there will just be 1 main company renting out a portion of their system to the other companies, so even though you have a contract with 2 diff isp's if they are in fact on the same system you would experience the same issues.

in general no matter what country you live in you should have 2 internet lines from 2 completely different providers. for example:
-1x fiber/dsl/dialup (most telephone companies offer 1 of these 3 options)
-1x cable line.

its pretty much 99% gtd those 2 choices will not have any overlap and use different servers/hubs/routing. if you have both of the above and still experience issues you can grab a 3rd line through the cellular company.

if you still experience issues with all 3 you are SOL

BT Homehubs are notoriously unreliable for anything that requires a stable connection. BT can (and do) make changes to settings remotely often followed by a forced restart and the Homehubs are just generally buggy as hell. The cheapest alternative from Amazon will always be a huge upgrade.

You don't need a dongle for backup internet, any smartphone works as a mobile hotspot and works surprisingly well for poker. Just make sure you don't have anything downloading at the time!

I think you will find that is 'mobile plan' dependent. I have the basic plan w/ verizon which doesn't allow you to use a smartphone as a mobile hotspot. The plans starting at a few tiers higher do allow you to do that.

Is that Canada? Works on any UK plan afaik, mine is only £8/month and works fine. Had no idea they could restrict that at the network level!

Interesting I haven't been giving instructions of this kind at all as of yet, but he did say it's not the first hop that's an issue. whatever a HOP is. My even bigger problem is the fact I am in a total signal blackspot and cannot get 3G for back up

I've had every kind of connection, from virgin cable to sky fibre and so on. From what support have said about it being a problem between my ISP and their servers, switching to someone else should help. ADSL company I'm with is Utility Warehouse, a virtually unheard of company in the UK with no particularly decent reputation. I'm getting a second line fitted to have Sky Fibre running solely to my pc with no one else in the house allowed on it. Guess we'll see

I'm American