Connecting with a friend

i am central, and he and his brother are east coat, i think i know where you are going with this maybe. i have a lot of friends there in the same area (within 20 miles of him) since i moved here i like to keep in touch, and he is the only person right now
that i know of that i have problems with.

Alright, here's an odd question - are you both located in the same region? Sorry for all the questions, just wanting to get a better understanding of all angles of your issue.

yea i can receive voice and text messages just fine.

Hmm, okay. Are you able to receive message from him fine, or is that an issue as well?

When I tryed to do bridge mode it was over 4 years ago and had trouble with the upload and download speed issue as in not connecting at the speed I was suppose to be. Since then I have been on routing mode with open nat and had no trouble until recent.

I have tryed to send my friends party chat invites and or games invites and or both and they and I get cannot connect due to network issues. As I know they do not live near me and is not with verizon but I can check tonight when they are on to be sure. I
have notice one thing when I opened the ports on the modem which I done recently I could connect to 1/4 friends that I couldnt do before.

As for my isp I have no clue if they use Large Scale NAT, (LSN) or carrier-grade NAT (CGN). When I call I have to call a different number due to level one tech being dumb. When I get level 2 tech they speak a little better english where I can understand
them. I have earthlink which goes thru verizon. I only know this cause i traced my ip and came back as verizon.

Also forgot to ask you. Before last year dashboard update I could stream videos off the dashboard without buffering now its impossible. It rebuffers ever1-5 sec. Example video of new map packs of COD ghost.