I invite my American friends to a run in our European servers, when suddenly I suffer from the same ol' problems [...] they experienced the same exact thing at the exact same time.
Still suspicious. I'll see if there is anything I can do about it myself, but judging from that particular experience I doubt it has anything to do with what's going on on my end.
Even if they're connected by cable directly to the router, it would still have to use the router, therefore, to properly skip that section, they must draw a cable to the modem.
Yes! And who's fault is it?
The EU server obviously! Dat EU server! Always laggy!
/leave ships