Here's why performance has got worse

See: http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/13/135485/quarterly/Q3_07_PressRelease.pdf
If you can't be bothered with that, read: http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3282-virgin-media-third-quarter-results-published.html

Both of which detail that VM has added 7,000 customers to it's ADSL product in the quarter of up to September 2007.

Think about that, and then look at my 24/7 monitoring (which I'm siick of going on about) over the last 6mths+:-
http://bazza.dyndns.org/rrdstats/baz14all.cgi?p=250d

Note how April/May/June weren't actually that bad - looking at the latency charts.

So, bearing in mind the above announcement, look at July/August/September.... remembering that this was the period that VM added 7,000 subscribers.

Now, bear in mind that the statement from VM only covers the period up to the end of Sept. Now, look at my charts for October/November - Even worse!!

And we wonder why the rot is setting in?

Well pointed out McBazza. The 50MB trials I found particularly amusing. On 8MB Max tonight I have slowed down to 68 kbps - and no I have not left a zero off. Every night this week I have been unable to access the virgin mail servers from when I get home from work till after 11pm when I can usually get through again. Broadband support from some poor chaps in India is dismal. I think we would all think a lot more of them if they did a hands up job saying it is screwed rather than their service status page saying all ok when it clearly is not for I suspect many thousands of customers.
I have an activation date with Be for a week's time and cannot wait to go though it will give me a lot of work updating email addresses etc as Virgin delete them the moment you go. What I find somewhat annoying is that we are expected to give 30 days notice etc like good little chaps while on their side they totally fail to offer what they promise. The grinning beard should in my opinion be getting fined industrial amounts and put in jail for fraud. That's what it is. No more and no less.

Edited by BahHumbug (Thu 08-Nov-07 21:34:55)

Yes, mail has always been relatively slow, and even slower later (I'm lucky to get my mail any faster than I can with dialup). I should add that it can even be slow when latency is fine (e.g. 12ms). This particular problem is no doubt made worse by the fact that Virgin's mail servers are located in the USA, IIRC. Virgin's mail service and servers (well, Virgin.net's, at least) are provided by a completely separate company.

Ironically, this is one of the reasons I'm reluctant to migrate, since I find the spam mail deflection provided by that company to be excellent. I would not want to change to an ISP who either has no spam blocking, or those that simply tag mails as spam and deliver it to you anyway.

Credit where's it's due. VM spam filters are excellent. I rarely get more than 1 spam a day in my inbox, often none. But as you say, it does seem to take ages to send a small text email; should take a second at most.
It's just a pity they cant get the 'congestion/overload of system' problem sorted.
If they could they would be a good ISP.
Mike.

______________________________________________________________________________
Mike (Semi-retired Radio & Electronics Engineer)
VirginMedia ADSLmax, up to 8Mb.

Very strange this evening.
Looks like a bad night.

I've never seen it so bad as 400kb on VM on TSTools test 3 for months.
Same showed 200kb on Giganews Europe.
That was with a BAM showing 230ms.

Found another BAM at 200ms and that showed 1.5Mb on TSTools test 3.

So the Latency wasn't relating very well to speed.

Looks like it's going to be a bad weekend, but who knows?

Mike.



______________________________________________________________________________
Mike (Semi-retired Radio & Electronics Engineer)
VirginMedia ADSLmax, up to 8Mb.

Edited by RepairExpert (Fri 09-Nov-07 18:16:40)

I'm on one of them non-tracert'able BAMs.
Next hop - nrth-t2core-a-ge-wan63.inet.ntl.com

I have to say, on the whole, this week has been pretty good. Backed up by my monitoring. There's been the occasional blip. But, nothing like 'normal'. Even speed has never dipped below 2Mbit (though, I should be getting 3).
I haven't had sustained 200ms+ latency since the 4th. And haven't had to run my script since then, either.

It's almost like R.Branson has said, "For chrissake! Get that bloke better latency, so that he stops shouting about how bad it is, and backing it all up with his stats & charts!!"

LOL; you mean he really cares!

______________________________________________________________________________
Mike (Semi-retired Radio & Electronics Engineer)
VirginMedia ADSLmax, up to 8Mb.

Oooooh!! This post of mine is linked to from the homepage!!

Extreme 'link from homepage to this thread' excitement! Well it is nice to see that at last VirginMedia have been shamed into admitted to problems on their service status page but these problems have been going on for months and months -which they know very well. They suggest reconnect routers etc well makes no difference - every night this week I have been unable to download mail from their servers at peak times. which as I do some of my work from home in the evening is a nightmare.
Apart from anything else multiply the amount of time waiting for stuff to come down the line x the number of people affected. They say VirginMedia hopes that the statement will clarify to customers that the issues have not been as a result of low capacity on their network. Now that is possibly the funniest thing I have heard all year. ANyway I am off to Be next week...I hope.
Bah!

Got a link to my thread as well Baz. Fame at last for both of us.

Good luck with BE Humbug; they have a good reputation.

Mike.

______________________________________________________________________________
Mike (Semi-retired Radio & Electronics Engineer)
VirginMedia ADSLmax, up to 8Mb.