LATENCY ISSUES - SOFTLAYER

Ok... so the hop you listed is not actually a problem... It's what they call "traffic mitigation" and it is common on congested nodes. If you notice however, that there is 0 packet loss and 420 hops. That means all hops were sent and received without issue. The latency there looks good as well.

There's still something up with your first hop, which as you said you'll have to take up with your ISP. Perhaps the hardware is failing or something and clearing that up will clear up your issues.... but I see early issues in all of your traces.

You can't really look at a single hop. You have to look at the whole trace to understand what is going on.

If it were real packet loss, or a real problem, all the nodes after that node would show similar signs of packet loss or latency, etc.

Because it is only that node and none after, it is just that node dropping the lower priority packets addressed to it.

Think of it like this....
I get you and 10 of your friends together and have you all stand in a line.. You next to me, someone next to you, someone else next to them, etc... all the way down the line.
Now, I hand you an envelope. The instructions are, if the envelope has your name on it, you are to open it, respond to it, then hand it back up the line to me. If the envelope does NOT have your name on it, you pass it to the person next to you.

This is basically how the packets work, and how the trace works.

They hand packets from one to the other only opening the ones addressed to them.

In the case of the hop you posted, it is a busy node. It doesn't have time to directly respond to packets that are low priority, instead favoring other things (like passing packets on). In this case, if it gets one of those envelopes addressed to it, it just drops it on the ground unless it has time to respond. If there are packets waiting to go through, they instead favor passing those on.

That is what "traffic mitigation" is. They favor some packets more than others, and generally only drop packets that are specifically addressed to themselves, never packets addressed to someone else.