MAG open beta

Well, I was really excited when I heard about the new MAG open-beta that was being offered through the PSN.  I got home as quickly as possible and began downloading it.  It was a surprisingly small file, so it didn't take too long to download.  After installing it I went to play the game and there was a small patch that had to be downloaded; that seemed ok to me.  After the patch I went to play the game and much to my dismay there was now a HUGE update that had to be downloaded.  This update took about an hour and like any update, couldn't be done in the background.  It was finally done, but I couldn't play it because access wouldn't begin until 8:00am ET.
This afternoon I get home and am extremely excited that I would be able to finally play the MAG beta.  I select my organization, change voice and face settings, and even customize a few of the weapon loadups.  Then the problems come, again.  First, the tutorial selection provides you with no actual missions, as of yet, but rather information on the game types etc.  I went into the sabotage selection and waited about 20 minutes for a full lobby before the game kicked me off and said it was due to a connection problem.  Since then I have rarely made it back to a lobby and usually it says there is no one else there or even online.  Most of the time it barely lets me off the home screen without giving me some vague connection error.
As of yet I have not had any luck with playing in the open-beta.  I'm sure that most people are having a similar problem.  I have tried researching the issue, but with no success so far.  If anyone has come across a reason for the connection problems or even a possible solution to fix it, please leave a post.

UPDATE
I have finally been able to connect.  Apparently the servers were off and on again for a majority of the day.  as of 7:00pm this evening everything has been working really smoothly.  They have fixed the load times to about 1minute as well.