It would be very interesting to find out the answer! I've tested different hosts and have one exapmle where it's definetly is a host problem (not you franky) but there some cases where I tend to think it's game code issue

You know, servers are all around the world, and the nearest to you should perform the best. Ping matters, but the most important is stability of you ISP. One day it rocks, another may be sucks. May be something happened on the route from you to lfs server, it consists of many hops, believe me. To find out how stable is your ISP now, you can use ping plotter (this is the name of the application). Trace google.com for about an hour and look at the results. Is the line stable green? If no - there were some problems with the connection during the test and with some probability you can timeout at lfs server, but this is not a rule (remember, different geographic, different routes). Usually something is wrong with the "last mile", i.e. your connection to ISP. Upgrading to broadband is highly recommended, but for example, for ADSL2+ you go to find the speed that suits your phone line, rather than setting 24Mbps..

BMW as low-rider? heh..