I have been seeing an issue with extremely long wait times when trying to logon to authenticate your account with the 1.51 beta patch.   This was not a problem when the patch first came out, but it's slowly gotten worse over time.   I am hoping that its because the 1.51 patch requires its own server to authenticate and EA did not set up enough for the beta patch, but that I will work better once the final patch is released.   For now, I am disconnecting from the internet and testing offline for my first strike modding.