Can someone advise if this is normal

I looked at plenty of guides etc but i can't get my head round it, is this classed as a normal/acceptable broadband graph for 350mb fibre.

Graph

In reply to a post by longstaff5:

I looked at plenty of guides etc but i can't get my head round it, is this classed as a normal/acceptable broadband graph for 350mb fibre.

Looks pretty normal for Virgin Media's cable network (DOCSIS), similar to mine (link in sig) on 200 Mbps. Openreach, or alternate network full fibre uses a different technology which can give 'cleaner' graphs.

Looks good for Virgin Media

On the other providers giving cleaner graphs, while there can be issues with the Virgin SuperHub response times, the cable service does have more jitter (the yellow bit) than most other fixed line services

I have Virgin 350 as well but am actually seeing much more packet loss even though I am not really using the line much:
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

I just set up SmokePing on my wired Raspberry Pi to the first Virgin Media hop when doing a traceroute to google.com, google.com itself and the think broadband IP and all of these probes are seeing intermittent packet loss as well.

With Virgin support not being available, do you know if this is fixable somehow? Power level adjustments or anything? And would DSL give me significantly better reliability? As I am working from home and doing a lot of video calls, latency is pretty key and I am seeing regular drop outs even over Ethernet. My SuperHub is in modem mode with a Unifi USG behind it.

Edited by ndfred (Fri 22-May-20 16:16:18)

In reply to a post by ndfred:

My SuperHub is in modem mode with a Unifi USG behind it.

I don't see much red on that trace. I'm using a SuperHub 3 in modem mode to an Asus router. Have you tried rebooting the SuperHub at any point? Some Virgin Media areas are quite different to others. I'm on the Hampshire/Surrey border.

I have rebooted it just yesterday, and ran the Virgin tests a few times, no faults detected. There isn’t much red, and most of the time it works just fine, but at some point video calls will just drop for no reason which is what I would like to avoid. Your trace looks much cleaner / more stable than mine!

I live in London, near Highgate. I know Virgin Media really just bought a bunch of existing providers, though in my case they had to pull a cable to my house when I got here so I would suspect the line is of great quality. Might just be too many neighbours sharing the same line?

In reply to a post by ndfred:

I have rebooted it just yesterday, and ran the Virgin tests a few times, no faults detected. There isn’t much red, and most of the time it works just fine, but at some point video calls will just drop for no reason which is what I would like to avoid. Your trace looks much cleaner / more stable than mine!

Video calls dropping is really annoying. I've had a few of those, and I had a full line of red on my BQM, none today, but had this once this week. Lost the internet and my Asus router's red light came on. Rebooting the Superhub brought it all back.

I live in London, near Highgate. I know Virgin Media really just bought a bunch of existing providers, though in my case they had to pull a cable to my house when I got here so I would suspect the line is of great quality. Might just be too many neighbours sharing the same line?

It is possible. Do you have family members using the internet at the same time as you are?

Mine recovered after a bit without needing a reboot, but it is really annoying especially when your work depends on the quality of your connection. Family members weren't using the connection heavily, and Virgin 350 has quite a bit of slack even if they were, so I'm not really looking at that.

A colleague suggested adding attenuation pads to reduce the voltage. My downstream channel shows -1.5 dBmV which is within the 1.5~2 range but upstream is at 4.475 dBmV which might be too high, I'll look into it.

In reply to a post by ndfred:

A colleague suggested adding attenuation pads to reduce the voltage. My downstream channel shows -1.5 dBmV which is within the 1.5~2 range but upstream is at 4.475 dBmV which might be too high, I'll look into it.

I've seen power levels discussed on Virgin's own support forums. I've seen attenuators that screw onto the F-Series connector on the back of the SuperHub - but they're usually akin to banging the TV with a hammer when it goes off.

I would raise a ticket and get someone from Virgin to look at the signal levels, probably try the forum too, as Virgin staff do visit.