as i'm not the only person living in BC, I imagine there's more people who experience this BC as in British Columbia? To troubleshoot this further I would like you to do some network path testing with a tool like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTR_(software) or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PathPing...

Yes, downloads in-game cancel after a while for large mods.
But! Using a dedicated downloader like jdownloader I get somewhat faster speeds, around 300 kbps which is still way slower than my actual connection speed, and I can sometimes successfully download mods.

I am having the same problem when trying to download mods from the mod portal (in-game and the website).
Wouldn't be a problem If the downloads didn't cancel when they got too slow :/

Using pathping I get these results: