I just got off the phone with oceanic. He was pretty adamant it was not an issue on their end (he said they had alerts that would go off). I was skeptical. He also claimed he had not heard this complaint. He asked me to contact apple and share the same information.
Just for completeness, here is the traceroute to a machine that is giving me 25% packet loss or so:
1 dd-wrt (192.168.1.1) 3.708 ms 0.847 ms 0.829 ms
2 cpe-76-88-160-1.hawaii.res.rr.com (76.88.160.1) 9.339 ms 9.639 ms 10.407 ms
3 xe-0-0-1.kluihi2102h.hawaii.rr.com (24.25.233.13) 21.910 ms 21.693 ms 22.217 ms
4 agg45.kmlahi0701r.hawaii.rr.com (72.129.47.152) 14.136 ms 13.020 ms 15.908 ms
5 agg31.tustcaft01r.socal.rr.com (72.129.45.2) 64.852 ms 68.324 ms 67.913 ms
6 bu-ether16.tustca4200w-bcr00.tbone.rr.com (66.109.6.64) 75.213 ms 71.774 ms 64.062 ms
7 0.ae2.pr1.lax10.tbone.rr.com (107.14.19.54) 65.096 ms
0.ae3.pr1.lax10.tbone.rr.com (107.14.19.56) 64.985 ms 68.207 ms
8 216.156.65.225.ptr.us.xo.net (216.156.65.225) 66.912 ms 69.114 ms 65.401 ms
9 207.88.13.82.ptr.us.xo.net (207.88.13.82) 79.992 ms 76.173 ms 84.362 ms
10 207.88.14.234.ptr.us.xo.net (207.88.14.234) 72.560 ms 72.656 ms 74.400 ms
11 216.156.84.186.ptr.us.xo.net (216.156.84.186) 76.375 ms 73.477 ms 72.591 ms
12 ussjc2-vip-bx-008.aaplimg.com (17.253.5.208) 74.988 ms !Z 87.601 ms !Z 73.976 ms !Z
Working backwards, I started pinging from the bottom down. Some of these machines don't respond to pings, but many do. As far as node 9 (207.88.13.82) I get a good connection:
--- 207.88.13.82 ping statistics ---
50 packets transmitted, 50 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 69.763/74.137/82.181/2.025 ms
node 10 in the path does not reply to pings, and by 11 we have the error:
--- 216.156.84.186 ping statistics ---
50 packets transmitted, 30 packets received, 40.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 77.480/83.229/102.746/5.000 ms
So, the error looks like it is happening on the way, before it gets to the end point.
It would be interesting to see if others seeing this issue saw the same problem. The commands I ran I typed into the "Terminal" application on OSX. If you hit command-space to get spotlight search and search for "Terminal" you should find it. Typing:
"traceroute 17.253.5.208" it would be interesting to see if you are passing through the same machines on the way to apple.