POE 1 & 2 Crash / frozen / disconnect when loading new areas .. solution

During my search for a solution to my problem I read many forum threads, guides and videos about crash/freeze/disconnects when loading new areas in game. Hopefully this can help people with the same issue I suffered with for more than a year.

To check if this is the same issue as I had in POE1 and POE2:

Press F1 in-game so you can see your telemetry and use the way-points to repeatedly change areas, if you eventually get frozen with the "Network" bar maxing out then this could be the same issue I experienced.

I used this latency testing tool: https://testmy.net/latency
Test repeatedly, if you ever get a high deviation percentage this is a problem.

To confirm my suspicions I used Proton FREE VPN and connected to one of the FREE countries listed, then booted POE2 and chose the server in that same country.
(You will not be able to game on Proton free VPN, it will be choppy as hell but you will be able to diagnose this specific issue for free.)

Then I went ahead and tried to replicate the crash/disconnect by loading new areas for ages but problem was gone.

I bought a Surfshark subscription as this was cheapest proper VPN that was good for gaming and I have never had this issue again.

The issue is ultimately with my ISP and how they are routing my traffic locally, I am now connecting from my house via VPN to only 1300km away and then into the local POE server and my issue is fixed with low latency. If you are in a country where fighting with your ISP to fix routing is easier than mine this could be an option.

I never noticed a problem in other games but I guess POE netcode does not tolerate high latency deviation.

This issue stopped me playing POE1 for almost a year so when it happened in POE2 I was devastated. I just hope this will help someone else out there, see you guys in town.