Every night from approx 7pm - 1am i get horrible lag spikes which make starcraft2 unplayable. Anything else i do on the internet is fast during those times and other games don't lag. I am using optusnet cable and called them about it but they just gave me generic unhelpful responses. Any other aussies having problems like this ? Anyone have any ideas ?

Hello Jedax

Running a trace route may help identify where the connection problems are occurring.

Steps to run the Trace Route command (Windows XP):

1) Click Start and then Run
2) Type "command" and press Enter
3) In the command window, type 'tracert us.logon.battle.net > C:\tracert.txt' (without the quotes)

Steps to run the Trace Route command (Windows Vista and 7):

1) Click Start and in the "Start Search" field type "command" or "cmd"
2) Right click on the CMD icon and select Run as - Administrator to start the Command window
3) In the command window, type 'tracert us.logon.battle.net > C:\tracert.txt' (without the quotes)

Please be patient when waiting for the tracert command to complete, it may take several minutes.

When you are returned to the command prompt, then the trace is complete.

A file will be created on your C: drive called tracert.txt that contains your trace route information. Please post the data from that file here.

Traceroutes provide a snapshot of the route at the time that they are created so intermittent issues may not show up and it may be difficult to tell where an issue is occurring when they do.

It may be necessary to run multiple traceroutes or to use a third party program that takes a longer look at the route.

You can try something like 3D Traceroute:
http://www.d3tr.de/

Place us.logon.battle.net in the Target field and click Trace

It should be left running for at least 10 minutes. If you get latency spikes in game or disconnections it should be left running through a couple of occurrences of those issues.

This provides a pretty good graph. A screenshot of that graph can be posted on one of the image hosting websites that exist:

http://photobucket.com/
http://imageshack.us/
http://tinypic.com/

To save the screen shot hit F2
On the picture tab choose JPEG
Choose Save
Name and save the file

A link to that post can be pasted in a reply to this thread and we can see if any issues stand out.