VM 100Mb issues. Advice.

Hello,

I've had this issue for a couple of months now with VM. Few months ago after years of being fine, my BB line seemed to bork up. I am an avid World of Warcraft player (Guild leader too so this really doesnt help) and would randomly start getting high ping times around 7:30pm onwards. Going well past 8kms.

I was upgraded to a superhub under advice of VM (which apprently would cure all my issues....sigh) and it didnt make the slightest bit of difference. At this point I have been in contact with their CS a few times either on their support forum or on the phone, both of which have conflicting advice. Forums report UBR issues, 2nd line support report no real issues.

I have had VM engineer visit me, test my internal network and basically "look" at their cabling and report its ok.

I have had a Monitor running for a month or so now. It seems to hold a pattern of being ok Tues-Thursday and sporadically rubbish for the rest of the week. An example is below, pinging my VM Superhub...

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share-large/637d3...

During those "red" times Warcraft becomes unplayable. I cannot download from steam and using mumble is terrible.

Strangely playing BF3 seems to be fine but that could just be coincidence.

I dont understand whats going on here, can anyone share any advice. Could anything on my PC

Looks different to the usual Virgin Media peak time latency issues

Unless the engineer was testing when in a period of this packet loss they might not have seen it.

Can you leave a ping running all the time from your side to somewhere and see if the gaps coincide, pinging somewhere inside the virgin media network would rule out some of their current issues

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Looks different to the usual Virgin Media peak time latency issues

Unless the engineer was testing when in a period of this packet loss they might not have seen it.

Can you leave a ping running all the time from your side to somewhere and see if the gaps coincide, pinging somewhere inside the virgin media network would rule out some of their current issues

Thanks for your reply. Pinging while the connection is going nuts tends to be fine in the past, even though pages are taking a while to load depending on latency in games.... I have used http://www.pingtest.net/ while I have high latency to various servers and they all report fine. even though the latency is 5k ms+

I also did tracerts to both 8.8.8.8 and to various warcraft realms I was trying to connect to with the same results all expected ping times..

I will test this again tonight, perhaps pinging this website for the duration I am online. See if anything appears incase my previous test where just caught unlucky......or something.

We consider packets lost if latency is above 500ms (I think), so latency of 5000ms would explain things, though why its so sharp, i.e. OK then bad no idea

I was debating if some sort of traffic shaping could be causing this issue. (I really have no idea)

For instance, during the evening its not unusual to have steam download at 10MB, dropping per meg every 2-3 seconds until basically it stops. If I pause the download, restart it, it will resume for a few seconds and drop off again. I can do this indefinitely.

I Quizzed VM about this but didn't get much sense out of them the guy was more interested in fobbing me off with a "My manager will call you back in 20" which didn't happen.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/13/virgin_media...

"While it's true VM is testing a new network traffic management system in some areas of the country, such as Liverpool and Aldershot, a spokesman denied the latest issues affecting an unknown number of customers had anything to do with throttling the service."

Hi, my experience with VM has thus far been to be frank pants, but having no other fast internet provider in the local area i have no real choice as 10 Mbits is not enough for the 4 heavy users in my house.

The ONLY way to get these sort of issues resolved with VM is to message the CEO.

I had very similar issue when VM had a massive advertising campaign in the local area, which baiscly over saturated the local exchange with new customers. Once this had happened the internet became unusable after around 2pm through till about 2am. When speaking to VM they like to say the there is a slight problem with Over Utilization in the area, but not a level they can progress for work, and within the KPI (key performance indicators) Even to this day so year later, i still have days where i cant even google something because the ping and jitter are so terrible, but other days are amazing and everything is fine. So inconsistent, if there were another option localy i would happily move provider, but there are no infinity based products in my area.

Email the CEO of VM and tell them you are not happy, i had a good service with the the old VMG300 Modem, to be "upgraded" to the new "superhub" only to find my service went down hill. i also use the SuperHub in MODEM ONLY mode, with my own quality router, as the router in the superhub can not even support the full speed of VMs 100Mbit if more than 1 person is using the internet bother parties get bad performance.

To conclude, i use a EnGenius ESR6850 which has a 300Mbit Wan to Lan, and is amazing for the price in comparison to the well known brands such as ASUS and NETGEAR, who you are paying for the PRETTY box rather than the pure functionality, they are around £50 in comparison to the more expensive branded at £150 to £200.

Another unhappy VM customer. Check their forums for your area, i can almost certainly grantee that there are more issue that you in your area.

Jonas

P.S there is no traffic shaping or control on the 100Mbit service, the reason i took the 100Mbit is can DL/UL 20-60GB a day and their lower packages are pathetic.

Edited by JonasTone (Tue 13-Nov-12 14:58:13)

Thanks, I have already tryed the superhub in modem mode. Didn't make a difference.

I've pointed the QM to my external wan IP and enabled my Superhub to respond to ping. I never used the internet after 10pm last night, and no one has used it since then and wont do till later and early hours it looked a right mess.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share-large/637d3...

Ive had my monitor up n down for almost 2 years, ive never seen such neat lag spikes, they look like someone is downloading/uploading at the connection speed limit for a very short burst (like speed tests) the parts between the spikes look level, run some TRACERT's with command prompt to bbc.co.uk see if there are any spikes in ping along the route. as its a UK based host it should be pretty consistent low pings across all the jumps.

Here is my QM
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share-large/cab34...

And a friend on 100Mbits on a different exchange.
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share-large/eb826...

As you can see by these not brilliant at all.

This is my copy paste TRACERT.

Tracing route to bbc.co.uk [212.58.241.131]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.0.1
2 6 ms 7 ms 7 ms 10.7.104.1
3 10 ms 10 ms 11 ms wolv-core-2b-ae9-713.network.virginmedia.net [80
.3.146.85]
4 8 ms 9 ms 28 ms brhm-bb-1b-ae7-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.10
5.159.145]
5 16 ms 17 ms 16 ms nrth-bb-1a-as4-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253
.185.105]
6 14 ms 19 ms 15 ms nrth-bb-1b-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253
.185.118]
7 20 ms 78 ms 18 ms tele-ic-4-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.
174.18]
8 18 ms 17 ms 34 ms pos6-1.rt0.thdo.bbc.co.uk [212.58.239.237]
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 20 ms 17 ms 25 ms ae1.er01.rbsov.bbc.co.uk [132.185.254.46]
11 18 ms 23 ms 18 ms 132.185.255.60
12 20 ms 17 ms 20 ms 212.58.241.131

Trace complete.

As you can see, some of the jumps time out some of the jumps have massive difference in each successive ping reading. This explains my lag in BF3 and other data intensive FPS games, and other data intensive MMOs such as EVE online. it may seem pretty stable, and only every now and then that it happens, but this is what causes the massive spikes. Jitter is the killer for VM connections.

When i was on Landline ADSL2+ i never had a jitter over ZERO, even when i was having internet problems. my average jitter at LOW USAGE TIMES like 4.30am is about 5ms jitter to 30ms ping to UK based tests, at peak times 2pm to 10pm 50-100ms ping and 10-30ms jitter.

Over saturated network running on 7-10 year old technology = all round terrible service.

P.S

Note that both you and my friend have the EXACT SAME double red line packet loss, at the EXACT same time, are you in Birmingham? i have a similar spike, that isnt exactly the same, but is at the correct time. This is TYPICAL of VM issues showing on one connection tend to show on MANY connections.

Edited by JonasTone (Tue 13-Nov-12 16:31:07)

Interesting, I received a spike of a very similar pattern slightly earlier in the evening too. I live in Wolves and started using the monitor service yesterday:

My Broadband Ping

Wonder what that was then? I was actually up and browsing at that time and experienced lots of timeouts loading websites. I assumed that it was just the sites themselves until I looked at the monitor and saw that, then I assumed it was my router being funny. Apparently not...