Virgin SH3 - intermittent 100% packet loss

I am using a Virgin Superhub 3 on the latest revision 9.1.116.603 and I dont understand why I'm seeing large blocks of red (100% packet loss) on BQM. It is random, sometimes for hours, sometimes for short periods.

It doesn't relate to anything we do at home as it happens through the night too,

Here's an example.
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

I'm not sure this is related, but I dont have an option on my Advanced/Tools/Ping screen to enable ICMP - and I've looked through other screens on the router settings and cant see it anywhere. But then again, the ICMP messages ARE getting through some of the time so I doubt it's because this option is disabled.

If I run the speed test on TBB and Speedtest.net, I am getting 300mb down and 20mb up. But I still get slow performance on my connection which, to my non-expert mind, is down to latency issues on the SH3 isnt it?

But does that explain the red bits on the graphs?

Any advice? This is driving me mad.

Is there any possibility you are on a pilot rollout for IPv6? You can tell from the format of the address the BQM is using.

If you are, then unless you are careful setting up the BQM it could be pinging the IP address of the device you were using when you set it up. That can cause this if that device is off or possibly asleep at those times.

IPv6 users need to establish their router�s address and set the BQM to that.

Hi Roberto
I'm not aware that I'm on a v6 pilot. My router address is v4 and its correctly defined in BQM.

It was just a thought, and worth ruling out. The red times did look a bit odd for an off or sleeping device.

The rest of the BQM looks uncommonly smooth for VM though.

Any chance you could put the live BQM link in your sig please, like many of us do. It tends to more useful than a snapshot, and even makes it easier for yourself to have a quick look .

Good idea Roberto.. I'm new to the forums so happy to pick up new tips. Hopefully my signature is showing my live BQM now. Todays graph is particularly interesting - lots of intermittent red blocks. I'm at a loss to explain it.

Yes, that is working , and very useful.

It is a right mess, as you say, but doesn�t look to me anything like congestion in the Virgin network. It is much more like a complete blockage. If we rule out the possibility already discussed it pinging a user device rather than the router, my next thought is some very heavy uploading taking place frequently.

Is that a possibility? Use of cloud storage? Heavy uploading can do two things, kill downloads and cause the router to ignore replying to pings.

Unlike the older SH's the SH3 has to have the firewall feature disabled, have you looked at that?

Hi
I do run a cloud backup on my PC (Carbonite) but I shut the PC down when I'm not using it. So there would be no cloud backup running overnight which is when some of the blockages happen.
Other things on my network are HIve, Sonos, and Tivo (Virgninmedia TV) - are any of these know to intermittently flood a network for hours on end?

@BuckleZ mentions firewall on the SH3. I have both the firewall enabled and IP Flood Detection enabled. Would turning these off make a difference? I can try it but does that make my network more vulnerable?

Chris

I would turn off the flood protection for a start. It may be taking a ping every second as flooding.

If that solves it you can happily turn it back on if you wish, as it would mean your service was basically OK. As I said earlier, the "normal" bits are far more steady than expected for VM Cable.

I turned of flood protection around 5pm and my graph has looked sweet since then. I'm going to keep fingers crossed and check after 24 hours to see if any red reappears.
Maybe this was the issue? Hope so.

Chris

Yep, fingers crossed.

Hmmm. Another bad patch .

Yeh, lots of bad patches. So the flood detection was a red herring. Turning off had no effect.

Someone mentioned switching off the firewall. I could try that but I'm worried about making my setup less secure. Is this likely to help, or am I just opening myself up to risk of attack?

The ping on or off is set within the firewall options. I can't see why turning the firewall off would help. If it were the cause there would be hundreds of threads about it.

Which isn't to say yours isn't faulty. It may be.

Did you manage to find an answer to this issue? I�m experiencing exactly the same. Long story short my internet was great for ages, but the last few months it can experience occasional evening stalls that last for anything from 5 s to 2 mins - not a big issue but enough to cause iPlayer to fail and/or get kicked out of a game server. I set up the monitor to check, and wonder if the packet loss is related or I�ve just set it up wrong. Seems weird to have 100 % loss while the internet appears to be functioning fine!

Hi I was wondering why my quality monitor was blank also and have the hub 3, seems every VM hub 3 customer is running this but there is no guidance or instructions directly from VM or thinkbb site (there instructions appear out of date) and not for hub 3.

I got some success, well its showing for past 2hrs at least, you need a seperate router like Asus AC86u or similar/better which supports the ping ability.

For some reason Virgin media removed the ping ability so we can not diagnose or fault find if our quality of bb is any good, probably done on purpose to reduce engineer call outs and less fault calls.

Try this if you got a Asus or similar router:

1:Hub 3.0 to modem mode then ethernet cable from ethernet port 1 (top port) to Asus router or similar WAN port
2:Ethernet cable from Asus or similar LAN port 1 to PC or laptop
3:Log into Asus router or similar via 192.168.1.1 or router direct address, Admin>Firewall>General and enable "Respond ICMP Echo (ping) Request from WAN"
it may be somewhere else in the menus or sound similar.
4:give it an hour or two and try TBB quality monitor should show something.

I have the same problems with my Virgin Hub3. Currently I have flood detection off but still get random periods of solid red. Sometimes it is OK for several days but at other times the problem recurs after a couple of hours. Disabling and immediately re-enabling the monitor always restarts it for a while, so clearly the BQM can make the Hub 3 see the pings again. Maybe there could be a solution by modifying the BQM software?