Could GeoIP issues be affecting download speed?

About 3-4 weeks ago there was a temporary outage (~10 minutes) from my local ISP. It’s a WISP who has generally been great the few years I’ve had them and been able to handily deliver 200-300 Mbit down and 200-250 Mbit up using Mimosa Networks tech.

After this outage, my download speeds took a dive and I reported the issue. They did some “network maintenance” and “replaced some equipment”.

After this I noticed I had a new and quite different IP than before. Shortly after realizing this, both my wife and I noticed we were being randomly detected as being in France instead of the US to some sites. For instance, I visited Ubiquiti Networks website store and was placed into the EU/France store and even my Raspberry Pi OS updates are hitting download mirrors in France instead of in the Bay Area where we live and I’ve seen them hit in the past.

*So my question at its core is, could this GeoIP issue be affecting my download speeds *because it seems like ever since all of this happened I haven’t been able to get more than 1-2 MB/sec download consistently from places like Microsoft, Apple, GitHub and more. Previously we could pull 25-30 MB/sec without trouble from all of these places.

ISP seems like they don’t know what is actually wrong. Nothing appears out of sorts. They do have a couple of other people reporting an issue. They’ve been in close communication with me asking me questions and telling me they’re “looking into it”, but not actually telling me a lot. They’ve asked me to do some tests with a tool called MTR which I’ve done.

I’ve definitely seen a couple of ZAYO and Level3 servers I’m consistently being routed through when downloading that are giving some pretty good packet loss in the MTR test, and I guess that could be it, but it doesn’t explain these other things that are also a little weird to me:

• Upload is not an issue. I can send 200mb sysdiagnose files to work all day long in seconds.
• We have had zero problems streaming content from Sling, Netflix, PBS, YouTube, etc. via AppleTV or iPad/iPhone.
• It just seems to be file downloads where we are experiencing this.
• Sometimes when I connect to a 3rd party VPN service, the speed issues completely disappear and I can download again at 25-30 MB/sec from MS/Apple/GitHub etc.
• This may also affecting work downloads via full tunnel VPN. When I run MTR tool while on full tunnel to an internal work download server I see packet loss there too.

Interested in any thoughts or insights on this situation.

Thanks!