The reception gauges on the majority of trading platforms tend attempt to show the latency of the your connection between your trading program and the server. (Basically the time it takes for a message to get to get and back)
General ISP/Internet issues aside, a few things can skew this figure on trading platforms, such as :
1) your computer/connection being bogged down on the data, (unlikely, unless on torrents too!)
2) your CPU or Flash Player being overloaded
3) the servers/host network being overloaded, or not being able to cope with sending a reply in a timely fashion (at the end of the day everything gets queued)
In most cases the latency is averaged over multiple goes, I believe that in the CS case, this is averaged over the last 3 goes, with Excellent being less than 0.25 seconds, Good 0.5, Avg, 0.75 etc...
If you're abroad then yes, you'll be affected depending on where you are, and chances are if you're remote location somewhere you'll get a lot of jitter (changes in latencies rather than consistent)... Try speedtest.net or pingtest.net and pick a server in the UK to see. If it's stable on those sites, and you just see varying connection with your provider, that's where the problem will most likely lay.....