Looks like you're having a better experience than others..
I just took a quick look at the PC forums for this game over at EA to see if there are major problems and I got lucky or if he was the outlier. I saw threads from people from Brazil, Austraila, and New Zealand complaining that their servers are gone and they are being forced to play on American servers even though those countries had their own servers during the beta. Since he is British maybe they are experiencing the same problem.
I didn't spend a lot of time on those forums but the server complaints I saw all seemed to be from countries other than the US.
First, I'll selfishly say that Americans don't seem to be having this problem so I'm not too worried about it. It is totally unacceptable to sell an online multiplayer only game in countries outside of the US if you aren't going to provide them with reliable servers though. Hopefully this is some weird glitch and it will be taken care of for those people quickly since it sounds like those countries did have working servers during the beta.