Been seeing ALOT of misdirected eq traffic and lag lately, upon researching so has alot of others. Here is some places to start. For those that use a router many routers need port forwarding done to make eq and venrtillo among others happier.
http://portforward.com/ has guides on which ports and how. If you know your ip and know how to login to it then the ones to forward are 1024 , 6000 , 7000 inbound tcp udp for eq and 3784 , 6100 tcp udp inbound for ventrillo. (same ports if you use ANY firewall). Also some guides recommend using a free dns server to speed dns lookups, my initasl trial of this said it didnt help aka patcher was still slow or intermintent, eq lagged still etc. Or suggested turning off router dns completely asnd hand editing all pcs through the router (havent tried yet).
I recommend the port forwarding to anyone using a router or firewall (most in guild prolly are). Also if anyone has any other network / internet tweaks pleasse let me know.
Oh btw patcher and half of eq use internet explorerer as the core so many tootlbars and plug ins can really screw eq up, dont add any toolbars (like google and such) if you can help it.