Question about server connection with friend in a different country...

Asked this over at BSN, but trying here too before I bother with EA support...

Backstory: A good friend and I have been playing ME3 MP together almost daily since early summer. He lives in the UK, and I like in northeast USA. We almost never had problems except the fact that the house he currently lives in has a lot of internet traffic which makes him a lousy host, so I pretty much always host our matches, and we haven't had any problems until about a week ago. Now he almost always loses connection during our games, usually within the first couple of waves.

What's happened since a week ago? The first thing was hurricane Sandy. Had no problems until after that time. I live a couple hundred miles away from where the eye hit, and didn't lose power at all, although some in my region did. Surely our grid had been weakened, but as far as I know, our area is back up to full capacity (or close to it). He's still losing connections from my matches. We tried as recently as an hour ago. Two matches, two lost connections (for him - I've always been fine) - both in wave 2 or 3.

Other things that have changed: Sometime shortly after the storm (Oct. 29-30), I got an Origin update. It may have been a day or two after. This is not the Origin update for ME3 everyone's been getting in the past couple of days (which gives brilliant loading times - thank you!!) - I just got that yesterday. Mind you I have had absolutely no problems hosting matches without him, or connecting to other people's lobbies, before or since the storm and this weird Origin update. I guess I'm one of the lucky ones who hasn't had any connection issues aside from this. But, something very strange also happened. For this week, when I send an invite to him, it is partly written in Chinese! The wording is something like jkthunder has invited you to join (Mass Effect written in Chinese - we looked it up) 3. Just the words "Mass Effect" appear in Chinese characters. It doesn't appear like that all the time, but most of the time it does. Additionally, a different friend invited me to join a match, and the wording for "Mass Effect" appeared in another different language to me - maybe Bulgarian or something? It looked Slavic.

I have a pretty decent fiber optic internet connection. Always low ping, steady packets, good upload/download. I use a static IP, have all the proper firewall exceptions in place, and ports open specifically for ME3. As I said before, no problems whatsoever playing with anyone else. Today, when the first invite appeared in partial Chinese to my UK friend again (and subsequently got kicked from the match), I decided to shut the game down, reboot everything including my computer, and turn off my AV. With the AV now off, it seemed to have sent him an invite in full English... yet once again, he dropped connection in wave 2 or 3 (whereas all the other public players stayed just fine).

The only other thing that is different is that we have been playing a little earlier than we usually have. Before, we usually played when it was near midnight for him, and his household internet traffic was at minimum. Lately we've been playing during what would be considered more like prime time hours, so there are others in the house streaming video and whatnot. He doesn't seem to be having problems joining other matches - although obviously the server will find something as close to him as possible.

Anybody have some insight to this? I have to wonder why in the world Origin might decide to send my invites all the way to China before it makes it's way to my friend in the UK. Have I been hacked? I've run all sorts of tests via AV, Malwarebytes and other means to see if I have something strange on my end. Everything stilll comes up clean and fast as ever.