Same Players, Same Session, different LAG WTF?

When I first noticed this, it was between myself and Betabow.

Our first session of player matches, (we live about 30-40 miles apart) we had a blazing connection, basically like we were playing offline, which stayed steady through a long set of about 20-25 games. The following day, we started off again, but with a noticably laggier set, at which point I chose a different stage, and got Jacky's stage, only to have even WORSE lag.

At that moment, I was thinking the Stage was affecting the speed. Our first set had been on Lau's stage, so I was thinking maybe Walled stages somehow made it slower.

I continued to try different stages when playing with Myke (LA to Australlia), and actually found our best match to be on Jacky's stage, with some terrible lag on Shun and Lei's stages, which seemed really simple to me. We even had lag fluctuating within a single round, since then I've felt it has nothing to do with the stages.

Is this just due to Live being busy, or the particular connection Live is providing at different moments varying in quality? Could it be the traffic of our personal ISPs?

I've also noticed that at times I get better speeds with people living much farther away than people who live about 15 miles from me! Seriously, I've had better connections with people in Colorado, NYC, even Japan than I've had at times with LA Akira, who I know has a crazy high-end 10meg ISP account.

any clues?

 

I personally dont like how its random stages. I think you should be able to choose what stage you want to play on...

 

I've been playing online games forever now, and people have been blaming lag on stages for a while now on different games. To me that doesn't make too much sense (which you already stated).

The only reasonable explanations to me is that it could have something to do with the xbox live service since they just updated the dashboard or it's possibly your internet service may be under a lot of volume. Those are just a few things to consider. Hopefully none of it is permanent.